How I increased my eCommerce revenue by €7,000+ in just 34 minutes [Case study]

Today I’m going to break down the strategy I used to generate €7,000+ for an ecommerce client with minimal effort.

The process

The process at our growth marketing agency is simple:

Data > Hypotheses > Experiments > Results > Action

I believe data is the starting point for driving online growth.

Use your data to run experiments. Those will give you results you can easily replicate. Every failed experiment answers questions and helps you get it right next time.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how I use Metrilo to extract data and use it in experiments. All examples shown are based on a ecommerce client of mine in the natural supplement industry.

Let’s get started.

What data do I track for effective email?

I do a small audit before I begin in order to see how the ecommerce store is doing.

Here are the main data points I track with Metrilo for each eCommerce business:

• Returning buyers (storewide)
• Repeat purchase ratio (per product)
• Revenue split (New vs returning customers)
• Customer lifetime value
• Average order value
• Seasonality
• Product cross-sells
• Subscription opt in
• Product satisfaction
• Customer product satisfaction
• Last order date
• Last website interaction date
• Interactions with customer service
• Purchase intent
• Pages visited/Articles read
• Type of user

I’m going to focus on the first 7 data points for this post.

Read more: A detailed Retention analysis to measure your customer loyalty

How I use these ecommerce metrics

Each of these metrics helps me make a decision about strategy – whether it is what email series to run or what changes to make on site.

Returning buyers (storewide)

I always start with repeat purchase ratio. If I see that repeat customers (who come back to shop again) are above 20%, I know there is potential and we can use email campaigns to bring in extra revenue.

In this scenario, we’re seeing about 30% of return purchases. This metric alone doesn’t say much, but take a look at what this means for revenue:

72% of revenue comes from repeat customers. This makes existing users really valuable, almost three times more valuable than one-timers. (I should note that this client of mine does minimal email marketing – a newsletter once in a while.)

If you’re looking for inspiration, Sleeknote has a great post with interesting ways to get more purchases.

Repeat purchase ratio (per product)

Going deeper, I realized this store specifically recommended supplements to customers based on their medical condition.

Prescriptions usually last 3 months. It makes perfect sense we’re seeing 3x more revenue from repeat customers.

I then move into repeat purchase ratios. I segment users by product purchased to understand how frequently they return (or don’t) depending on the item.

In this case, our best-selling supplement is in the middle, and an up-sell bundle is below it. Basically €100,000 (all-time) came from one star seller and its upsell.

We can see the repeat purchase percent is between 36-44%.

If we move to frequency of purchase, we see that most repeat purchases happen 60 days after the first order. So it’s a good idea to remind customers they are running low on the supplements.

You can see this from the dark blue “34” which shows the most 2nd orders in the cohort are placed 2 months after the first order.

Customer lifetime value (LTV) & Average order value (AOV)

These metrics are quite incredible if you pay attention to them. You start realizing that if you increase your AOV by 10% you can make a serious amount on top.

They are also great for user segmentation so you can start communicating with high-value users in a different way.

I spend quite some time with these numbers. It’s helped us open different arms of business, and I’ll explain why.

According to the data, on average a customer spends €221.06 in their lifetime:

A quick filtering shows me how many customers have spent less than that €221.06:

4,154 customers spent under €221.

If I reverse it, we’re seeing 1,307 customers who have spent over €221.

I break down the top 5%, they have spent €1,945 on average. That is my ultra VIP segment, worth a separate campaign altogether. I explore those high spenders’ profiles to see what they did on the website and what products they bought. I have to understand them better in order to stimulate their loyalty.

I see they buy completely unrelated products – this indicates they aren’t intended for personal use. It’s either some sort of a store or a distributor.

I isolate these customers and send a targeted email to them asking for more information. I combine this with a Typeform quick survey, and I promise a 20% promo or an Amazon coupon to get more responses.

From the data, we see that B2B customers spend a lot more. Maybe there is an industry specific we could use. This is really where LTV and AOV shine.

Seasonality

I’d like to know if seasonality is a factor in sales, because if it does, I do all my prep work on campaigns early in the year, so I don’t need to fumble later on.

For supplements, as you’d expect, seasonality doesn’t really show much change. There is a big spike in November due to Black Friday and a dip in December because everyone stocks up on Black Friday. 😀

That said, January, April and September present great opportunities to sell more.

January is after the Christmas period, April  – after Easter break and September  – after the summer holiday. People are more willing to change their lifestyle after holidays or after they’ve indulged in bad habits. This company’s message is all about changes in lifestyle and they offer totally organic products for that purpose.

Product cross-sells

You’ve seen the “people also purchased” feature when you shop on Amazon. I apply the same logic via email, only I don’t need a developer to do it.

I’m a solid believer in “once a customer, always a customer” – so I do my best to stimulate an upsell or a new product purchase using the data I find.

I analyze what products are most commonly bought together:

We can see the main product (Star seller) is most often purchased with the upsell (Upsell A) – by 30% of buyers.

Honestly, a 30% upsell is fantastic (65 out of 270 orders).

We aren’t even promoting it – there is a great potential for bundling options on our site and email funnels for this.

For more success stories, check out our ecommerce case studies.

Last few words

I’ve acted on these five insights for my client and we’re seeing additional €7,000+ come in through several email funnels.

I wish there was a “One size fits all” strategy for email strategy that I could share, but unfortunately there isn’t.

You really need to dive into your own data and try different things. I love Copyhackers’ state of awareness guide which has helped me come up with my email content.

I also suggest you’re clear on sales funnels and where ToFu, MoFu & BoFu play on your ecommerce site. Set clear goals for each email.

As a rule of thumb, always try to add value when emailing your users. Explore their shopping behavior, try to understand what drives them and craft relevant emails.

Want to increase your eCommerce email subscribers by 3x?

I’ve got one hack I use with Metrilo to increase my email subscriptions almost instantly.
– Spoiler Alert – It’s a pop-up. Find out how I do it here »

About Nitesh Sharoff

Nitesh is a growth hacker at Growth Runner. He helps businesses identify the quickest ways to achieve their desired outcome in the shortest amount of time. If you’d like to work with Nitesh or simply say hello, you can do so here.