10 Ecommerce Marketing Experts Share Their Top Growth Strategy

There’s one thing that I’m always shocked that, in general, freelancers and business owners don’t do very well.

Following up. The classic check in or touch base.

You know: It’s that little nudge of an email that essentially says, “Hey, remember me? I’m here and open for business if you (or anyone you know) needs me right now. Let’s work together again.”

It’s so simple…and yet so many people fail at this.

They forget to do it, and then when things get slow, they think, “CRAP! My business is going to fold. It’s all over. This is the end.”

When in reality, they probably have a list of people they haven’t checked in with in a while who need help. They just forgot/are too busy to reach out on their own.

If you haven’t heard from an old customer in a while, that’s not to say they don’t need you, like you, or even miss you.

They probably just have 120,523 things to do and it’s your job to be proactive and say, “Hiiiiii, I’m still here if you need me and also here are some ideas of things I could do for you.”

Following up, checking in (whatever you wanna call it) has helped keep my business sustainable (and growing!) over the past five years. And it only takes a few minutes to do.

The best and most profitable ecommerce brands in operation today know this to be true: it’s not about getting the sale — it’s about serving the customer.

It’s all about community.

Consumers want more from the businesses they interact with and buy from online. They want to know what makes you different. They want to know what you care about, why you do what you do, what you’re doing to make the world better, and how they fit into your story.

To capture the attention, trust, and dollars of your audience, you need to build a community around your ecommerce business:

1. Know What Matters to You
2. Know What Matters to Your Customer
3. Own Your Mission & Beliefs
4. Tell and Share Real Stories
5. Blend Digital with Physical
6. Find Like-Minded Partners
7. Remind, Reeducate, Reinvest

Email marketing was the answer.

We began to prioritize email, rolling out some basic newsletter programs and encouraging more opt-ins.

Over the next few months, we experimented with email drip campaigns, campaigns that built up trust with our subscribers and ultimately sold more product.

And within a year we were on to advanced email marketing: behavioral-based segmentation and targeting campaigns, all driven off a customer database and 100% automated.

Results followed. Our list size exploded. The value per subscriber — which had hovered around $1/subscriber/year […] eventually moved past $1/subscriber/month.

Retail isn’t what it used to be and will not remain what it is today.

This said, the core values of retail remain consistent: Customer service, customer experiences, store branding and employee performance all impact your retail success. Don’t overlook these key factors no matter how much tech or data eases your operations.

Unlike [ads], email marketing is generally a fixed cost. If I send you [10] emails this month it costs the same amount as if I send you 1. That, my friend, is a huge advantage.

You can’t do that with [ads]. If I run 10 Facebook ads and you click on each one of them, I pay 10X more for my marketing.

This is why email marketing creates profit. You pay the same amount and get a lot more back.

According to a Mckinsey study, ‘E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.’

Your profit comes from email.

What if there was a way to create ads on the fly that showed customers exactly which products they looked at on your site?

What if there was a way to tell Facebook about all of the products in your online store and only show potential visitors ads that have the highest chance of converting?

You can do exactly that with Facebook Dynamic Ad Retargeting. Dynamic ad retargeting is the act of showing and creating highly relevant ads on the fly with your existing product database.

This is by far the most powerful type of ad that I use in my online store and it converts like crazy.

It gets all of the benefits of regular retargeting without the maintenance.

With spray-and-pray discounting, there’s always a risk you’re over-promoting to your most profitable customers, just as you may be under-promoting to customers who would have converted with the right offer.

Level up by understanding customer buying behavior at the segment and individual level and help you optimize your promotional strategy. This includes cross-channel behavior (e.g. which customers frequently buy online and return to store) and online behavior, like frequent cart abandonment to receive email discounts..

Integrating your promotions engine with CRM, analytics and testing tools allows you to segment and target promotions by customer conditions, and measure the impact of discounts on revenue and profit through holdout tests. And increasingly, AI and machine learning is playing a role in driving this targeting.

[If content is king], Customer experience is queen. Customers expect a solid experience. It doesn’t have to be a perfect experience, it just has to be as close as possible to transparent. It has to anticipate what their needs are and be invisible when they want it to be.

Speed plays a big role in that. […] Once you have content that answers questions whenever you want; once people are focused on their customer experience. It has to be fast. Let [customers] do what they want to do, then let them get back to what they want to do as quickly as possible.

Mark Benioff has said that “speed is the new currency of business.” I’d prefer to say that instant gratification is not fast enough.”

We don’t remember numbers, statistics, features or even pricing, we remember how something or someone made us feel. The more compelling the story, the more personal and similar it is to your customer’s story, the better it will resonate and inspire action.

Putting theory into action:

Use video ads and copy to tell a compelling story. The best stories are those that resonate with your prospects and make them say: “Hey, that happened to me!”, “OMG, that’s me”, or “Damn, that could happen to me”.

You might have also noticed that most ads are short and don’t have much text, but I’ve found many times that when the story is compelling, people want to read the content and have no problem with the long copy at all.

In fact, I have consistently found that our Facebook ads with longer copy work significantly better than ads with short copy:

The ad with the longer copy had almost 200% more conversions than the shorter one.

• Spent 3-4 months collecting customer data with surveys
• Ran a back-of-the-napkin ROI test to make sure our redesign budget/investment wasn’t insane
• Invested 15-20 hours in doing a site audit and compiling a list of problems/needed improvements
• Wrote a 16-page design brief outlining (in painful detail) the scope of the project
• Invested $5,000 in pre-design wireframing services to build a rock solid blueprint
• Spent months evaluating [the designer] to see if I he’d be a good fit for the project

… And all of this was done before a single line of code was written. It’s a surprisingly large amount of prep work. But it’s absolutely essential if you want your project to be a success.