Grow your ecommerce store by doubling down on what works

Guest Author

As an Ecommerce entrepreneur, which of the following items are on your planner?

a) Focus on email marketing both in automations and newsletters

b) Figure out Facebook ads and how to grow your Instagram exposure 

c) Try out pop-up stores 

d) All of the above + jumping on the bandwagon and doing any marketing trend that’s been featured in any popular platform lately 

If you answered letter D, it also means you’re taking a big risk by trying to take on everything at the same time. 

After all, my imaginary friend Confucius says it’s best when he said that if you’re chasing after two rabbits, you’ll catch neither. And you don’t want to spend all your time and resources into chasing after something that turns out to be nothing, right?

Let’s talk about how you can prevent this risk and instead grow your ecommerce store by doubling down on what works in today’s video:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/xsy1mhOtozk&feature=youtu.be&h=360]

1. Finish the process. 

It’s like planting a tree: it’s better to plant a coconut tree first and take care of it until it grows fully, rather than to plant a coconut seed first, then change your mind and replace it with a mango seed, then with an avocado seed, then with an orange seed – if you do it this way, you’ll never see your tree grow because you didn’t stick with it long enough. 

Focus on a single marketing strategy first and stick with it until you reach the point of learning where you’ll learn one of the following: 

  • How valuable something is to your business’ growth. For example, this strategy is effective since it added $500/month into your revenue. Great! How can you work on this so it’ll grow to $1,000/month or even more? Or;
  • How not valuable something is to your business’ growth: If it’s not moving the needle, and you don’t see any significant results happening, then great! At least you learned from it so you can now move onto testing other strategies that may work for you.

You can only reach this point of learning when you “exhaust” a specific tactic – when you start it, stick with it, and eventually get to the bottom of it. 

2. Focus on the ones with positive results. 

Once you’ve done this, the next part is focusing on the strategies that work for you and doubling down on them. 

Take your customer support, for example. If your customer support is top-notch and you can convert 50 customers a month through referrals alone, you know it works, so how can you double down on this? 

3. Figure out how you can improve it.

You want to get the best results that can help grow your ecommerce store over time, right? 

In our example earlier, perhaps you can automate the administrative tasks associated with this so you can deliver a more personal touch to every customer interaction and increase your conversion to 100 customers a month? 

There isn’t a marketing strategy that’s one-size-fits-all, so dedicate some of your resources to find out what works for you and then making the best out of it. 

Two caveats on this advice, though: 

In my earlier video about “The Last 5% May Not Be Worth It”, I talk about the idea that even if you’re doubling down on something, you’ll reach a point where the marginal gain won’t be the same anymore since you’ve already reached the point of learning. 

You don’t need to double down on a specific strategy forever. Once you’ve reached this point where there’s no obvious viable improvement anymore, it’s time to move on to the implementation of the next strategy. 

Also, remember the Pareto principle which says that 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your top marketing strategies? It applies to this concept, too. You can spend 80% of your time working on the strategies I’ve mentioned on this blog post today, and then spend the remaining 20% into experimentation. Go ahead and try out something completely new, something you’ve never heard of before, or maybe even something that’s trending in your industry today, and find out if it works for you. If it does, then, double down on it until you reach the point of learning again.

I hope this concept can help you grow your business by focusing on a tried-and-tested system that works and optimizing it for the best results for you. This way, there’s a certain reliability factor that can help you move forward efficiently and effectively so you can reach that much desired sustainability of your business. 

See you again next week, then! Cheers.

Sometimes, more isn’t better. Trying out all of the marketing tips and tricks all at the same time means you’re taking a big risk. Here’s how you can stop this from happening today.

If you’re chasing after two rabbits, you’ll catch neither. Find out how this relates to this week’s video today.

Learning from a specific strategy comes in two forms: it’s valuable to your business so you find out how you can improve it; or, it’s not valuable so you need to move on. Find out the difference in today’s video.

Sometimes, the greatest education comes from experimenting and executing something that you’ve never even done before.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash