Please Note: I’m most confident in applying my approach to e-commerce brands doing under $1MM / year.

The reason this process works so well for e-commerce brands under $1MM/year is there’s usually more low hanging fruit and brands are too focused on new customer acquisition versus focusing on all 3 growth levers: New customers, average order value & returning customer rate.

The secret sauce here is focusing on the right things at the right time, in the right order.

I recently helped e-commerce brand Copper Moon Coffee that sells space themed coffee online to scale from $18k/month in revenue to $60k/month in just 90 days. 📈

It’s a must try if you love space & smooth coffee. You can learn more at coppermooncoffee.com​

They had been stuck at that $18k mark for about a year. Spending more money on ads didn’t seem to help much.

I did all of this through my productized service “The e-Com Growth Engine.” The goal of that service is to double revenue. In this case I happened to triple revenue, but my goal is always to double. It’s also the same process I teach in my “e-Commerce Fundamentals Course” that you’ll find in the footer of every email I send.
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I share this not to try and get you to buy a course or hire me. I share this to let you know that you can use the same steps to improve your revenue. I never promise you’ll double revenue, because there is no magic e-com bullet.

Having a clear, repeatable process you can use that is based on the timeless fundamentals will yield better results than switching tactics & hacks every week.

Here’s how to I helped Copper Moon Coffee triple ecommerce revenue in less than 90 days.

1. Set our targets: I started by figuring out the exact numbers it’d take to increase new customers average, order value & returning customers by 33% each. Hitting each of these targets would double revenue overall.
2. Clarified Messaging: I took them through a StoryBrand “BrandScript” to the make sure we had a clear, compelling & CONSISTENT story to tell through ads, our website & email marketing. Remember: People buy with emotion, not just logic. This process greatly helps us tell our story versus trying to compete on features & benefits. For us, I really wanted to make the space theme our unique selling point because there’s just too much competition for smooth coffee.
3. Email Automation: I setup 9 key automated email flows. From the browse abandoned flow to win back flow. I stood up 3-5 trigger based emails in each flow. This was the biggest contributor to our growth. Before our partnership they didn’t have much in terms of email flows.
4. First time customer offer: I changed their on site pop offer up from 10% off your first order to “Signup for Our Free 7 Day Coffee Camp” to get a free grad gift upon graduation. This cup had great economics for us which helped us increase profits while decreasing new customer acquisition costs. Plus it educated people over 7 days via email about our story, our coffee and how to use our site. This had been a game changer for new customer acquisition costs.
5. A/B testing landing pages: I used Google Optimize to test a story driven product page vs. our default product page. We saw a 2% lift in conversion rates doing this. I made sure to only serve this A/B test to Facebook Ads traffic to not skew results from existing customers coming through email.
6. Media buying: Usually media buying starts before all of the above of taken care of. I’ve seen media perform better once the above are in place first. I started by cleaning up our exclusions and made sure to connect Facebook to Klaviyo to exclude all past customers. This ensured we’d drive new customers with paid ads. Then I used dynamic creative testing with their new messaging and real photos of people enjoying their coffee to take their CTR from 0.9% to 3% across the account. Simplified the account structure from 20+ ad sets to just 3 ad sets and we were off to the races. This mixed with our A/B testing via optimize and all the email flows working hard for us all played nicely together to help us triple revenue. I also cleaned up our exclusions and brand budgets on Google Ads to make sure we were focused on being as efficient as possible on Google. Lastly, I fired up a couple YouTube campaigns targeting space lovers with the first 5 seconds of the video hooking people with the line “If you love space & coffee, you’ll love this!”

Here’s a quick high level recap.

1. Focus on the 3 growth levers. Not just new customers.
2. Invest time to setup email automation. It’ll help everything else you do.
3. Use paid ads for new customer acquisition only.

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