Hello and welcome to another episode, the Winning with
Shopify podcast to me, your host, Nick Truman.
Welcome to the show. It's so good to have you all
listening in. It's currently a ridiculous heat
wave here in the UK. So if I suddenly break down and
start sweating and faint in the middle of this, apologies, but
it's time for another Tuesday tea break talks.
And as you've probably seen in the title, I've been collecting
over the last few months this list of eight things that I
think weight strategies for eight different things within a
Shopify business that restrict growth.
And you need a strategy for all of these things.
You cannot afford to ignore them.
So without further ado, we're going to jump straight in and
start talking about how you can grow Shopify store.
If you don't have any of these things in place, then I think
he's going to have a conversation with your team,
your partner, yourself, depending on how big the
organization is or your bosses. Always good to to manage you
say, Nick said so, which has never helped anyone, but you
can, you can try that. And that's my British sarcastic
humour right there. Let's go say #1 the first two I
think are quite obvious but I have split them #1 is a multi
channel advertising strategy. So many brands we work with come
to us, to my agency. We do PPC and SEO and SEO
applies to the second one. But PPC applies to this pay per
click advertising through Google, through Meta and lots of
other channels like that. You could use other channels we
don't look after like TikTok, for example, but one of the
things we find is some brands, they get so successful down 1
channel and they get hooked on that.
And the whole business is relying on that one channel.
So that one channel might provide 70 or 80% of all
revenue. And the problem with that is
there'll be a limit to how much you can spend on that Channel.
So you need a multi channel strategy, which in essence means
you need multiple channels to be working for you.
I'm not going to talk about it today because it's a whole world
of, of confusion and arguments and opinions.
But there's a whole thing called attribution.
And that's how you attribute sales to each channel.
And again, I'm not going to go into detail on this, but you
need to be really, really clear how you attribute each sale that
comes through back to the channel that sent that traffic
in. And you might need to invest in
some better tracking tools than some of the free ones that you
would otherwise use, for example, meta attribution.
It did get better in March this year, but it's not as anywhere
near as as good as it should be. And it will take credit for
anywhere it was even remotely involved in a sale and it will
take 100% credit for that sale. So if someone spent $100, Meta
would take the full $100 and say, hey, I generated $100 for
you. When actually if they clicked on
a Google ad as well, it's like, well, was it Google ads?
Was it Meta ads? And if you look at some of the
reports and it's my final point on this, again, I'm not going to
get too much details today because I could do hours on
this. But when you start to look at
your reports and you get a better tracking tool and you see
actually how many channels people have used to purchase
your product. The more expensive and the
bigger the commitment the product is, the more times they
will visit your website through a whole multitude of sources.
Last example I'm going to give you is say you have a 10% off if
you join our newsletter, 10% off your first order, join our
newsletter and you get like a welcome 10 discount code or
whatever because of the way that you're then signing up to e-mail
and then clicking on an e-mail to go and make your purchase.
Was it e-mail that triggered the purchase?
Was it Google ads that sent them in on the same date or time they
made the purchase, even though e-mail was technically the last
source, but GA 4, sorry, Google ads was before that, but they'd
previously clicked on Meta ads two or three times.
Which channel do you give the do you give the credit to?
And what most brands decide to do is go.
We're just going to credit them all evenly, but that's easier
said than done with the way that tracking works.
Anyway, on to #2 as I say, they they are links.
That's a multi number 1 is a multi channel advertising
strategy, specifically when you're paying for advertising.
And the second one, and this is something brands often miss or
they say, let's invest in paid channels because we get the
traffic today and we'll do that first, then we'll start
investing in SEO and other stuff later, which are your organic
channels. So organic channels could be
where you build a following on your TikTok account or you're
following on your Instagram or your Facebook or it's SEO
traffic coming in or some journalists just pick up your
product and love it. Or some influences are like, can
I have a free product? I really want to feature this
thing or I use it all the time. Can you know, can I have an
affiliate code? And that would still be
considered organic because you're not paying per click or
advertising with an advert to get that traffic in.
The influencer is just sending the traffic in.
And so many brands I find rely on either one or two.
They rely on an advertising strategy and organic strategy.
If you rely on both, suddenly it's like, all right, our SE OS
fallen down one day because Google's done an algorithm
update. But we're fine because we've got
all these other channels still working for us.
And it's a, it's a much better way to build a business.
And certainly if you think about selling the business one day or
you're looking for investment, you're going to really struggle
If it's all reliant on that one channel, they'll say this is a
very, very unsafe bet for us. This is not a good investment
for US #3 I talk about this quite a lot, so I won't go into
detail on this today, but I'm going to see some a couple of
the other ones as we get through.
But this is a lifetime value growth strategy.
What we mean by lifetime value is every time you get a sale or
you get an order in, you get a new customer.
How are you? You need to have a strategy as
to how are you going to get a second order, a third order, a
fourth order from that customer, ideally without them using
advertising. And I find so many brands are
like, they just look on Shopify and they sort of look at the,
they don't look at the 'cause they look at the effect and they
look on Shopify analytics and go great.
On average, people are buying 2.8 times from us.
That's pretty cool. But actually your e-mail
strategy kind of sucks. Your product packaging doesn't
encourage someone to want to come back and buy again.
And you don't have, which I'll talk about as we go on a bit
more. You don't have other.
I'm just checking. We've definitely, yeah, number
six, we'll come back to this. Number six massively applies to
the lifetime value, but you don't have a way of farming more
orders and from that customer and more customers from that
customer as well. And that's lifetime value.
And a lot of brands are so hell, hell bent, I think is the
phrase. They're so gung ho and trying to
get people in from advertising, get new customers in all the
time going great. We've gone from 5000 customers
to 7000 customers over the last six months.
You're like, that is great, but what if your 5000 customers all
bought a second time? It'd probably cost you less and
be less effort. So if they'd all bought a second
time, on average you would have made 10,000 orders rather than
one order per customer at 7000. So again, I'm making these
numbers up hypothetically, but you get the idea.
You need a strategy of how you're going to grow lifetime
value from all of your existing customers #4 this one.
I mean this one is mad. How many brands miss this?
This is probably one of the most neglected things I see and it's
win back campaigns for lapsed customers.
It's the customers that have purchased before and haven't
purchased since, and brands do next to nothing to try and win
them them back. I was trying to think of the
song and I can't remember the song, but there if you imagine
it's like a relationship, it's like they're I'm never going to
that's it. I'm never going to give you up,
never going to let you down. And it's like I'm going to fight
for you. I'm going to fight.
That was it. Cheryl Cole going to fight for
this love. So you want to fight for this
thing. If someone's already bought from
you, why don't you offer them a discount, Offer them a discount
that's less than it would cost to acquire a new customer.
But these guys are already trained in buying.
You know, they already have some habits and some loyalty to you
and they already buy from you. But you'll need to work before
that on some sort of report, some sort of warning system as
to when. When do we consider them lapsed?
Like if every, if most customers buy at least once within a three
month window and it's now been six months since an order or you
reach seven months and they still have made an order.
Now they go in the lapsed customer bucket.
What are you going to do? You're going to phone them.
You can send them a personalized e-mail.
You could just just post them a free product, say, hey, we miss
you. Here's a free sample of our new
protein shakes. Like try this amazing.
And if you want it 30% off your first, your first order, you
know, up to 100 lbs and with a minimum of you've got to spend
at least 40 lbs, you've got to buy at least a kilogram of
protein powder. And again, really, really simple
ways to do it. Anyway, quick sip of coffee.
I know how dare I drink. I think, I think I said it was a
cup of tea earlier. How dare I drink coffee on there
on tea break talks. But there we go.
It's been a long week and it's only Tuesday.
OK, so that's number four win back campaigns.
So when somebody has bought from you before, hasn't bought from
you since, or has bought multiple times and stopped
buying, you need to win those guys back.
Write them a love song, send it on an e-mail.
That would probably be quite an effective piece of marketing
#5-A product optimization strategy.
How are you going to get feedback on your products from
your customers? How do you use this?
How do you find it? What doesn't it do?
What could it do? And the more you can talk to as
many of your customers as possible about that, A, you're
engaging with the brands, the more likely to come back and buy
from you. And B, they're giving you all
the information you need to make your product even better.
So a lot of the things I have already mentioned and will
continue to mention in the other points will start happening
organically. If it's a great product, you
will just go back and buy another one.
So for example, one of my friends who runs a podcast, he
asked where I got this amazing sign from.
So I sent them a link to the guy who made it and said this guy
made it for me. It's obviously custom makes, got
a logo on it, but this guy made the sign and he went great.
I'm going to go and buy that. The reason I wanted to do that
is because it's a great sign. It was a great price.
The communication of that person was fantastic.
I had a great experience and I wanted to share that.
So if you have great products, people will naturally want to
tell other people about these products.
They will also want to come back and buy similar products.
Everyone's got that item of clothing that's just so good
that you want to buy another one.
You want to be that brand that's got that product that's so good
you want to buy another one. And so good doesn't just mean
expensive and the best possible quality.
It might be like for people that go to the gym once a week and
this top will probably only last like 100 workouts, but then you
get another one. So maybe have some sort of
recycling trade back scheme, for example, to encourage people to
want to do that goes back to the lifetime value one.
But you need a strategy for how are you going to improve your
products over time. If you assume your products
perfect on day one, you're completely missing the point.
It will probably be the worst it will ever be on day one.
It will get better from there. And I see so many brands so busy
trying to sell their products, they don't take a step back to
go. If we made a few tweaks to this
thing, it wouldn't cost like to the design, it wouldn't cost us
any more to manufacture it, but it would be so much better and
it gives us something to shout about.
And everyone that's bought version one, hey everyone,
there's version 2 now. So product optimization
strategy, so important. Number six out of our list of
eight, this one, I kind of mentioned this earlier, I'm
calling this a customer leverage strategy and it kind of relates
into referrals this and what you want to do is encourage your
existing customers and any customer that buys from you to
convince someone else to come back and buy from you can have a
quick sip of coffee. So the genius of this is
someone's bought a product, you could even do this once.
They leave you a 5 star review for that product or for your
business and now you've got a five star review.
You know they love you, so give them some sort of incentive to
introduce a friend to your brand.
So you could say anyone who buys, here's a unique discount
code for you and anyone that uses it, they get 10% off every
order and we'll give you a 10% of whatever they spent.
Or we'll give you $1010.00 as long as they spend 100, as long
as your friend does. So when people ask all those
really nice trainers, where are they from?
You say, oh, you get 10% off. Let me give you the code.
Let me do a referral thing. And again, it gives you
something to talk about on e-mail.
One of the biggest issues I see with the lifetime value growth
strategy falling apart or lack of strategy is people, they run
out of ideas of what to put on their emails to send to their
customers. So I'm a big fan of anything you
could put on an e-mail to send to customers.
So a referral program to say if you refer, you know, if you
refer a friend and get them to get them to mention your e-mail
address or your name once they've bought and we'll give
you both the $25 voucher for your your next order.
Something like that. Nice and simple.
OK, customer leverage strategy. Think of creative ways to
leverage your existing customers to get more customers through
those guys #7 this one again, this is like the spreadsheet
boss, but so many brands missed this.
And what I'm calling this is a strategy for margin growth.
As you grow a business, margins get tighter and tighter and
tighter. Let me give you some examples.
Once you have a certain amount of staff in a physical location
in lots of countries, it's certainly the case in the UK and
it'll be the same in lots of countries.
You now need an increased level of risk assessments, you need an
increased level of fire safety, you need an increased level of
HR to look after those staff. You need an increased level of
financial support for the business, for people to make
sure salaries are paid on time, to do performance reviews with
all of these staff, to manage things like holiday and annual
leave. It's easy when there's five
people and you're the boss. You can do all do it yourself.
It's nice and easy. When there's 50 people or 100
people or 200 people, then it starts to become a bit of an
issue. There are also, in some
countries, tariffs change when you reach certain thresholds,
sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
Lots of manufacturers will say if you buy one, it costs $10.
If you buy 100, they cost $9.50 each.
If you buy 100,000 units, they're $3.
So suddenly you're like, OK, same product price, but also we
become a bigger customer to that supplier.
So they're going to give us some special treatment, maybe help us
improve the design of our product a little bit and we're
going to get a much, much better price.
So factor this into your growth plan.
But again, lots of businesses as they grow, they might start with
like an 80% margin and then 60% of the product price remains in
the business is like gross profit or net profit.
This is pretty good. But as the business grows,
that's going to come down to like 5 or 10% in total.
And those are pretty thin margins.
So one thing you can do is plan to increase the prices of your
products given that all your business costs are going to go
up over time. So going to have to increase
those and if you do them at the same rate, your margin stays
flat, which is quite good when you're growing to keep a flat
margin there. Lots of brands make a loss until
they reach like those thresholds for OK, we can send all our own
products out now from our own warehouse.
That's cheaper than paying A3PO service, which I don't know if
it is, but for example, you can get quotes from these guys and
say we're small now, but we're planning ahead.
If we were to come to you, how much would it cost if we had
this much stock, this many orders a month, etcetera,
etcetera, and we're shipping to these locations.
So you need a strategy for how you're going to grow your
margins. The more your margins grow, the
more aggressive you can be on advertising.
And you'll find with advertising that the, the more you try and
get, the more you increase sales or increase spend.
In a channel like Google, your ROI, it, it, it will fluctuate.
There'll be certain points where actually if we spend more ROI
increases because the platform has more data, it can make
better decisions. It can help us find more
profitable customers. There'll be other points where
you reach a limit and go. There are only so many people
looking for this product now in our ad show in front of every
single one of them. So they're going to start
getting ad fatigue. So what we now need to do is
look at other channels where we're going to have a lower ROI,
a lower return in investments because we're going to have to
show them an advert on something like Meta or TikTok and convince
them to buy it, which is going to be harder than someone who's
already looking for that product on Google.
So the margin growth strategy, I think is incredibly important.
And again, I don't really hear any brands talk about it that
much. It's normally an afterthought
of, Oh my gosh, we're not making any money anymore panic.
We need our margins to be put the prices up.
Oh no, we're losing sales. And it's all done as a bit of a
gut reaction. And the business is in quite
dire straight at that that point.
If you plan to increase your margins by 5 or 10% a year,
that's a very different way of looking at the business.
It makes you so much more secure.
You're going to be more profitable.
You can probably grow a lot faster in doing that.
Number 8, this one, don't switch off if you hear the first half
of this statement, but this one is you need an exit strategy.
And that's the first part. The second part is even if you
don't plan to exit, I've exited a few businesses.
I'm not planning to exit my current one, but I run it as if
I could. The reason I do that is it
forces you to do things like keep your accounts in order in
case somebody else needed to look at them to value your
business and thinking of buying it.
If you're, if you are in a position where you could exit
your business at any point, whether you want to or not is
fine. But if you're in a position
where you could exit it at any point, that means the business
could run without you without the owner.
And if the business can run without the owner, that means
you've automated all of your processes and set up some good
levels of resilience that if you're 1 marketing person left,
what happens? If you weren't there doing
product design and development anymore, what happens?
So in terms of growth strategy, again, these are all going to
eat into your margins, but it's going to make the business run
more like a well oiled machine and not be reliant on any single
individual or single supplier, which means you might need
multiple suppliers, you need multiple advertising channels,
you need a wide product range. If a few products suddenly go
out of stock or flop, we've not lost all of our revenue.
And also things like developing and designing products long
term. You want to build a business
plan that's like, OK, we need four people working on that.
We need a marketing team of 10. We need warehouse staffing of
between 5 and 15. If we're going to do that bit
ourselves, if we're going to manufacture, you just don't want
to have one person, any one of these roles.
It's an amazing business. We've had on the show a couple
of times. I won't say their names so that
I can say a bit more about them, but they had this amazing e-mail
guy and he came in and scaled up their e-mail database.
I think it was a multiple of like 5, like literally five
times the e-mail database size in about 3 or 4 months.
And they went from about 5 or 10% of their revenue coming from
e-mail from existing customers up to about 60 percent, 60,
absolutely flying. And then he went off and started
his own business and the business was absolutely stuffed.
It was so reliant on that e-mail revenue coming in and no level
of handovers and other stuff would really help.
Fortunately, he came back in one day a week as a consultant and
trained up a few other people to run it.
But again, hindsight's a great thing, right?
They probably should have got that person in there working in
that already. If you're not an owner, if
you're working in a business and listening to this, I think the
same thing applies like you're, whether you're working in
marketing or you're in product development or web development.
If you've, if you're the only person in your role, have a
conversation with your boss, say, look, I'm not planning on
going anywhere, but I'm so reliant on this person.
And if they suddenly left, I've got a massive problem.
So why don't we work out some resilience solutions here as
well? And I think that's the the exit
strategy is let's make the business good enough that if
anyone exited, not just the owner, it would still be a good
business. It would still run as normal and
it would still thrive. And that's really, really
important. I'm going to read the list that
again and then we'll say goodbye until Friday.
Say #1 you need a multi channel advertising strategy #2 you need
an organic marketing strategy, free traffic #3 you need a
lifetime value growth strategy to get more sales and more
revenue out of every customer that you get.
You need a win back campaign for lapsed customers that stop
buying from you. You need a product optimization
strategy to improve your product at all times.
You need a customer leverage strategy, actually, my second
hand, a customer leverage strategy so you can leverage
your existing customers to get more customers or more revenue
from those guys, which kind of feeds into the lifetime value
one. These all kind of tied together
#7 is a strategy for growing your margins and making more
money per order, per product, etcetera, etcetera.
Because you're going to need to do that as you grow.
And #8 an exit strategy. Make sure no individual in the
business, we'll make sure the business is not reliant on any
single individual. I hope you enjoyed today.
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