How do you 10x your business during one of the worst economic depressions/pandemics in history?

One of our eCommerce clients recently woke up to more orders than they could handle, all during a time when most businesses were struggling to figure out a game plan to keep their doors open!

And on top of that, Amazon and Walmart have virtually taken over all online real estate with their million-dollar marketing strategies and teams.

How can a small business compete with that?

This client came to us four years ago and asked us to help them compete with Amazon and Walmart - for a fraction of their budgets, of course.

We love challenges, so we implemented our proven and evergreen 4R eCommerce Marketing System that is comprised of four pillars – Reputation, Reach, Resell and Referral - to help him systemize his marketing campaigns.

Marketing Heroes 4R eCommerce Marketing System Graphic

In the first year, second, and third years, they saw sales doubling each year.

Yet during COVID-19, they received a HUGE spike like they had never seen before:

 

During this 2020 time period from April 1 to June 26, you’ll see from the screenshot above that their sales saw a 10x spike compared to four years prior – and all while others struggled to keep their doors open!

Now they are considering expanding and purchasing their competition.

So how did they do this?

Below we highlight a few things that we helped 10x this client’s business.

Key #1 – Reputation: Website and Reviews

As an eCommerce storefront, your website is obviously the very foundation of all your marketing efforts; however, if it is not converting well, then your marketing will suffer.

So we focused early on at optimizing for conversions which included optimizing the website for speed as well as adding items to each product and category page such as benefit driven headlines, quality pictures, sales copy, and reviews.

Regrettably, there was no real reviews strategy when we began working with this client, so we added an email drip campaign that asked for a review once someone purchased, a campaign designed to ask them several times for a review.

By constantly working on conversion optimization, they have seen around a 300% increase in conversion rates.

Key #2 – Reach: Google

Like it or not, Google owns most of the real estate online and if your eCommerce store is not in the right place at the right time when customers are searching for your products, you are missing sales.

So we focused on a few things:

  1. SEO – Organic rankings on Google take the longest time but have the highest ROI. So, we have worked on high buyer intent keywords for the past four years. If someone searched for a specific model of their product, our intent was to be #1. Currently, traffic from Organic makes up 50% of their overall traffic and sales and they typically make close to 100x what they pay us each month.
  2. Shopping Ads – We determined that their Shopping Ads made up 80% of their sales from Google Ads, so we helped optimize their Shopping Ads and removed keyword and display ads.
  3. Facebook Ads – After a LOT of testing, we determined that Facebook was a waste of time, energy, and money for this client’s audience. This is not always true, so it is worth testing if it will work for your products and audience.

Key #3 – Resell: Retargeting Ads and Newsletter

As part of the 4R eCommerce Marketing System, retargeting ads need to be set up to follow people around on Facebook and the internet with ads from products that they have come to your storefront to view.

This is super important because people do not always buy the first thing they view.

Additionally, we added a monthly newsletter to target people who purchased from them before.

Luckily, they had a large list that allowed us to quickly and easily send specials out on a weekly basis, then each person that buys something is added automatically to the email marketing platform.

Key #4 – Referral: Referral

What eCommerce store asks for referrals? It’s unheard of really; however, after adding an email referral campaign to their marketing strategy, our client saw an increase of 245% in sales which makes sense as people trust other people.

Because of these four key things we focused on (Reputation, Reach, Resell, & Referral), our client has seen a 10x increase in sales as well as a 500x ROI on their spend with us in the past four years.

Not bad – at least that’s what we think.

Need help with your eCommerce Store?

You do not have to go it alone.

Just like this client’s team, you can come to us for help.

Our 4R eCommerce Marketing System will get more sales to let you get back to growing your business!

 

Schedule a Call!