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Tackling the seven figure hurdle?
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The day after the champagne has been popped in celebration of six figures or you receive that trophy from Shopify, you’ll realise you're faced with a new challenge… What now?
For most eCommerce brands, reaching seven figures represents a tipping point for your business as a whole. Businesses don’t just scale in one continuously smooth line, they need to adapt and respond to change in order to see more success.
Around the point of generating seven figures is where your business will find itself once the initial well of highly convertible customers, who simply love your brand for its products, has dried up. You can no longer call yourself a niche brand if you want to continue to grow - you’ll need to find customers who are unfamiliar with your product and its benefits too.
Let’s look at seven ways to break through those plateaus and scale your eCommerce brand past seven figures.
We’ve all heard someone say in a meeting at some point, “A great product will sell itself!” It’s a tired sentence often thrown out by those who don’t understand the importance of marketing or anything else that goes into modern commerce.
We’re much more happy saying “a great product will sell itself, but you can definitely give it some help along the way.”
If you’ve made enough sales, you’ll know that you have an audience who loves your product. To these customers, that initial saying rings true - they just want to know what products you drop next. However, a colder, less familiar audience isn’t likely to convert as easily.
Unfortunately, most people aren’t as willing to try new things as they may think, and customer loyalty is often nothing more than a sense of mutually beneficial Stockholm syndrome.
However, by lowering the barrier of entry to buying for the first time, we can entice new customers. Whilst this can, and most often does, take the form of a discounted product, the best version of this adds so much value to the product that a customer has no issue checking out.
A welcome bundle, 3 for 2 product offers, and more have all become commonplace amongst those ultra successful eCommerce mainstays.
Unless you plan on sticking to a small stack of products, as your business grows, so too will your product line. And as a result, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work anymore.
A more diverse product portfolio opens you up to a more diverse customer base. It’s therefore important to have multiple entry funnels, each with ads that speak more directly to the potential customers who make up each demographic.
The simplest example of this might be a men's fashion brand branching into women's clothing too. It’s likely that this brand has a largely male audience. And, unless they create a second entry funnel, through performance ads, organic, etc. their new target audience aren’t going to find them swiftly.
This can have the added benefit of expanding the palette of your existing audience too. For example if a formalwear brand started to make more casual clothes too, it’s likely that a portion of the existing audience would be interested and purchase the new products.
We always say that eCommerce is a 365 day industry, and that no sales day can be more important than your performance year round. That’s all well and good, but the truth is, those sales days massively affect your performance year round.
As a growing brand, those core sales days of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and so on, are essential for, not just making more sales, but getting your name out there, and establishing that people do indeed want your product.
With more eyes on your brand and more customers, big sales days become major opportunities to build your brand overall. With a larger pool of people to market towards and more customer data, you can make those skilled business decisions that will allow your business to grow.
It’s highly likely that your initial set of customers were actively on the lookout for the products that your brand sells. They scoured across multiple different sites before finding your product and immediately added it to their cart.
However, that’s not everybody, and not everybody is going to be aware of - or pay much attention to - the issue that your products solve.
Throughout your site and marketing, it may be worth discussing the problems your product solves. And, for lack of a better word, “creating” new ones. Let’s take Loop Earplugs as an example. A product that really only solves one core problem - too much noise.
The initial customer pool was made up of people who were looking to concentrate better at work or when studying. Once that customer pool dried up, Loop expanded their messaging to highlight the dangers of prolonged noise exposure on your long-term hearing and the role noise plays in getting a restful night’s sleep. In doing so, they created customers out of frequent event attendees and those struggling with sleeping problems.
Similarly, find new avenues to apply your product to. Your activewear brand’s primary audience may be gym-goers, but there’s no reason it can’t be popular with skateboarders, runners, or other similar audiences.
We aren’t going to touch too much on finances in this blog, as that’s a bit of a separate conversation. However, by looking at your tech stack and whether it contains any redundant integrations, we can identify potential areas to save on cash too.
As your eCommerce business has evolved, you’ve likely brought in a number of tech integrations to solve the different problems that you’ve encountered along the way. That may have been several years ago, and you’ll likely find that...
A) Those issues aren’t issues anymore.
B) Other integrations have evolved to offer multiple solutions at the same time.
C) Your eCommerce platform of choice now offers the solution right out of the box.
Taking stock of the integrations you have in place, assessing whether or not they’re actually required, and stripping back to the most minimal tech stack you can will not only save you money on subscriptions, but allow you to integrate and standardise new features much quicker.
Gut instinct, business acumen, and “the zeitgeist” can get you further than many care to admit. But, as much as we may want it to, an eCommerce business cannot run on vibes alone. At some point, data has to at least guide what we do next.
A digital transformation of some form may be one of the turning points in transforming your eCommerce business from one that just scrapes 6 figures, to one that easily passes 7 figures.
eCommerce has so much data for you to track across your different channels, but it’s collating it together into an actionable format that’s going to set you apart. A Regular analysis of your metrics and customer feedback should play a major role in making informed decisions. Data driven insights are key to understanding what’s working and what needs adjustments.
The word data may make you shiver as an eCommerce business owner, but any business worth its salt is built on solid, data-backed decisions.
Shameless plug? Yes - but you cannot expect your business to simply grow because you want it too. You need outside help no matter what stage of growth you might find yourself at.
We have more than a few case studies of brands working with us and taking that next step to becoming 7 figure, 8 figure, and even 9 figure businesses. Sometimes a great product, business vision, or marketing campaign is hampered by the business’ immediate resources. That’s where an eCommerce agency can give the best practice insight needed.
We couldn’t resist a bit of self promo, so if you want to hear about how we can help scale your business beyond 7 figures, contact us.
