For many e-commerce companies, it would be an immense success if their own sales doubled within a year. In the case of one client of the performance marketing agency Adstronauts, however, it actually grew by 2,543 percent during this period. How this was achieved through the right use of meta platforms as well as other marketing measures is explained by Adstronauts managing director Jana A. Micus, who applied for a place on stage at the E-Commerce Berlin Expo. We thank her for the tips she shared with us in advance.
If you want to grow as an e-commerce brand, there are basically only four levers available to do so. It doesn’t matter which lever you use to bring about improvements, as they all lead directly to more sales.
However, there is a certain logical sequence:
In the first step, and of course permanently, you need more new customers. You get more new customers first and foremost through more traffic in the store – and through the right traffic.
The second step is to ensure that customers order more frequently in the store. This means that the frequency of orders must increase.
The third step is to make sure that customers spend more on an order. You have to see what can be added to the product that was already ordered anyway. In essence, this means increasing the average order value.
The fourth lever is the performance of the online store, especially improving the conversion rate. This way, the increased traffic can also result in a maximum number of orders.
These are the four points that we as Adstronauts focused on together with our client. For more traffic in the store, we focused on the meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. On these we can reach the most potential customers with paid ads and at the same time are not dependent on search volume. So we opted for push marketing.
Creative’s biggest lever
At the beginning, we tested different market approaches. In the process, we tried out various influencers in ads and, most importantly, a wide variety of creatives to find out what is a long-term best practice for the brand. Meanwhile, in our opinion, creatives simply form the biggest lever to achieve the highest possible profitability if you have already found the right target group for you. All other possible hires tend to have much lower output.
It’s the nuts and bolts to keep iterating and improving from there. However, many e-commerce companies don’t take a close look at the numbers or do too much at once, so the data is less meaningful than it could be. For example, we look at changing one thing at a time at Creatives to see how we can get better piece by piece. That’s the most important thing: everyone has to figure out the best approach for their brand to reach the right audience at the right time so that new customers will order.
Doubling the conversion rate
After attracting more and more users to the brand through ads, we realized that only about one percent of website visitors were buying. From experience, we knew that a higher conversion rate was possible in this market. Therefore, we made certain adjustments in the store, focusing on trust-building measures such as reviews, since the brand did not yet have a high profile. In this way, we achieved that about two percent of visitors buy. In this case, this led to double sales with the same advertising budget.
Such optimizations are extremely important in order to profit from a higher margin than the market competitors. Those who acquire new customers more cheaply and therefore have a higher margin have more money for marketing to drive new customer acquisition further. We also found a way to increase the rate of returning customers to 36.61 percent through effective email marketing. This allowed us to increase the frequency of orders without having to invest further advertising budget for these customers.
All levers in view
If we had focused on just one of the four levers mentioned above, our client would not have grown as quickly or as profitably by a long shot. However, most stores let many of these levers out of their sight or don’t know how to get the most out of all of them.
In summary, growth costs money. Therefore, the goal is to always be as profitable as possible. This is the only way to achieve a 2,543 percent sales boost.
