Having trouble scaling your ecommerce business? You’re not alone. With nearly 3 million direct-to-consumer stores on Shopify today, fierce competition and an ever-changing ad landscape of Meta and Google, it has become more and more difficult to profitably scale and build a sustainable e-commerce business. The benefits of retaining an Ecommerce Growth Marketing Agency has officially become a necessity.
Today, most ecommerce businesses face the same problems. Here are some:
-
Generating Profits from Store
A lot of brands grow in gross revenue, but profits do not grow and sometimes even shrink. In the coming year, we anticipate that a lot of businesses will shut down in the recession due to poor decisions and inability to generate profits. Our team ONLY cares about your profits. Something that many agencies don’t even look at.
-
Building a Brand That Consumers Resonate With
If you’ve got yourself an ecommerce store, you have to focus on building a brand with longevity. Too often, we see ecommerce stores selling random products without any story or soul. Selling one-off products isn’t sustainable, which is why we recommend Amazon or Etsy for that business model. It takes a lot of skill and investment on the product and marketing side to build a brand.
-
Driving and Increasing quality eCom Store Traffic
Traffic equals store visitors. Keep in mind that the cost of advertising goes up each year; therefore, the cost of traffic gets more and more expensive along with it. In 2022, a lot of the brands we spoke with said the same thing, “We relied on Facebook to advertise, but Facebook does not work anymore—it is broken, etc.” The fact is that it’s not broken… our entire portfolio profitably scaled in 2022 and will continue to do so in 2023.
How Should Brands Overcome Those Problems?
Hire an ecommerce growth agency with a proven track record of scaling DTC brands through advanced and the latest strategies in acquisition (paid media) and retention (email and SMS) channels. An agency that will bring a highly skilled growth marketing team that will oversee every side of your business: your business plan, growth strategy, paid social and search channels, ad creative, website UI/UX, email/SMS marketing. So wherever you need support and solutions, you’ve got it.
So why Evestar?
We’re a collective of entrepreneurs that have successfully scaled over 100 direct-to-consumer brands in the last 3 years. Our team lives and breathes ecommerce—it’s our DNA. For each account, we dedicate a full-service growth team comprised of:
Experienced CMO
Creative Director
Copywriter
Google Media Buyer
Ecommerce Strategist
Graphic Designer
Facebook Media Buyer
Shopify Developer
Our Onboarding Process:
Before we start spending any marketing dollars, we have to outline a clear set of goals and create the right strategy for your business. Here is how we do it:
1. Brand Deep Dive
We’ll first conduct a thorough deep dive into your brand to understand your product, your profit margins, your inventory and new product line-up for the next 12 months.
2. Tools and Analytics
Our sophisticated tech stack allows us to access the right analytics and tools to understand your cash flow, profits, and heart of your business. Those tools will unite metrics from all paid channels and your Shopify store. Remember: It’s crucial that you understand your key business metrics and partner with a team that understands your profitability.
3. Set Profit Goals
Every dollar spent needs to be accountable to profit. At this stage, we’ll not only help you generate revenue projections; we’ll also figure out how to allocate appropriate marketing budgets and inventory for the year so you can hit all your revenue goals.
4. Strategy
Growth Marketing Strategy will consist of all major marketing channels.
- 1. Website UI/UX
- 2. Creative Strategy
- 3. Paid Social Strategy: Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pinterest
- 4. Paid Search Strategy: Google Shopping, Non-Branded Search, Branded Search and YouTube. We’ll also plan to advertise on Bing if your product caters to older demographics
- 5. Email Marketing Strategy: Grow your customer list, build robust email automation and come up with email marketing campaign calendar
- 6. SMS Marketing Strategy: SMS marketing automation and campaign calendar
Extraordinary!
After a string of failures with other agencies, Evestar blasted our stats up 600-700%, from ROAS to conversion rate. Our online sales in their first month were up over 600% compared to our previous average month. Now we’re scaling toward six figure monthly sales and beyond. They redesigned our site, set up digital ads, started an influencer program, and re-built our email marketing. Results beyond our wildest dreams, and the future is bright!They are the real deal!
Steve Dunlap / CEO at Meghan inc
Absolutely Fantastic!
We started our company in the US with very little experience in the US market, and Evestar, from the very start, was absolutely fantastic in helping us get things going. They took over all of our digital marketing side of things and grew our company hugely within months. The team is amazing and always replies right away. Couldn’t recommend Evestar enough for all digital marketing needs!
Callum Freed / Sales Director at The Wood Veneer Hub
Сonfident and driven!
We are a smaller startup and had tried several digital agencies prior to coming to Evestar with varying degrees of success. They are different from others and had some strong recommendations right from the very start. Lolita and her team are a force, confident and driven. We took their advice and it is clear now Evestar truly knows how to scale businesses. I am happy to report we continue to see sales grow at an amazing clip thanks to the hard work and dedication of the entire Evestar team.
Christopher Madeiras / CEO / Founder at PūrLife Brands Inc.
You couldn’t ask for a better partner!
We’ve been working with Evestar for a few months now and we’re blown away. Their team has been instrumental in revamping our performance marketing, content strategy and CRM. You couldn’t ask for a better partner to handle your digital efforts. They’ve simplified and improved our tech stack dramatically and the results are proof. Their team just gets it: our brand, what we’re trying to build and how to do it. They anticipate our needs and are proactive in ensuring we’re growing efficiently.
Leigh Harding / CMO at NOOD
You couldn’t ask for a better partner!
We’ve been working with Evestar for a few months now and we’re blown away. Their team has been instrumental in revamping our performance marketing, content strategy and CRM. You couldn’t ask for a better partner to handle your digital efforts. They’ve simplified and improved our tech stack dramatically and the results are proof. Their team just gets it: our brand, what we’re trying to build and how to do it. They anticipate our needs and are proactive in ensuring we’re growing efficiently.
Leigh Harding / CMO at NOOD
Some of Our Brands
The Problem You Might Be Facing
You’re focused on the wrong KPIs
The biggest mistake we see brands make is spending media dollars on the wrong channels and on the wrong campaigns.
Chasing high ROAS in the direct paid search or paid social channels. Media buyers can easily manipulate high ROAS metric in Facebook and Google by deploying budgets into retargeting vs acquisition. For Facebook, it’s chasing retargeting audiences and for Google it’s focusing on branded search. Sure, this might result in high ROAS—but there will be zero new growth.
Chasing low CAC in the direct paid search or paid social channels. Similar to the above, while allocating the majority of your budget into retargeting and branded search with lower your CAC, it will stagnate growth.
Running Constant Email Promotions. Email promotions can drive an existing audience to buy more–lowering CAC and ROAS. However, you need to be strategic. By constantly advertising promotions to your customers, you’ll never sell anything at full-price.
Sure, ROAS numbers will look great—but you can’t scale a business if you aren’ focused on driving customer growth.
The Solution
What You Should Focus On
Most ecommerce businesses that come to Evestar for help, are looking to double their growth in the next 12 months. The only way to do this is by focusing on new customer growth across paid acquisition channels (Paid Social and Paid Search) that makes profit and sustainability sense. You must also perfect the Retention Strategy via email and SMS Marketing. Think of email/SMS marketing as your defensive line and paid acquisition as your offensive line. Those two channels working strongly together will be able to give you the growth you are looking for.
At Evestar, we’ll do more than simply run your ads. As your full-service growth team, we’ll serve as your CMO, your partner and your support system that educates you on WHY you should do things a certain way, WHAT metrics are important at your stage, and HOW you get to your goal profitably.
Here is what we chase:
- New Customer Acquisition: We focus 70% of media buying on new customer acquisition. The truth is that nCPA should be your obsession, not blended CAC.
- Break Even Point: It’s vital that you understand your profit margins, and your break even point. Allocate the budget for acquisition channels that will get you to at least a break even point.
- MER%: It’s important to understand your MER number. Remain laser focused on that number and never go above it.
- ROI: Focus on blended ROI versus direct channel ROAS. ROI is what matters most when it comes to your shopify revenue
- LTV: The main tool in customer retention and LTV is proper merchandising by your brand. Thinking that LTV is solely marketing’s responsibility is looking at things with rose-tinted glasses. LTV is an indicator of how much a customer likes your brand, loves your product, had an exceptional customer experience and is ready to return as a customer again to make a purchase.
- Maximize LTV: Robust email automation and email campaign execution will always help maxime that LTV.
Our Philosophy
Are we the right partner for you?
- Unlike other agencies, we’re not here to play games. We’re also not hired to simply run ads. We’re here as your growth partner, your interim CMO with an expert execution team. We care about helping you build a sustainable and profitable ecommerce business.
- We always keep it fresh and bring you new ideas on how to generate more profits. Digital Marketing evolves very quickly and we are at the forefront of it. This is our job and this is what we do best.
- This is a partnership—which means we might have to tell you things that you don’t want to hear. If we want to help your brand win, we can’t be afraid to lay it all out on the table and have those tough conversations with you.
- We will keep you accountable on your product and merchandising decisions.
- If we partner up, trust us fully and let us lead. This is a prerequisite of success for us. If you are not ready to do so, then you are not a fit.
Predictable Balance NEEDED to Succeed
If there is no balance, there is no business. When it comes to scaling profitably, our team will remain laser focused on keeping the following metrics in balance.
CR AOV LTV Visitors VC nCAC MER
- Conversion Rate: Conversion Rate is one of the most important metrics in ecommerce and the first thing we look at. It’s a good indicator that you are on the right track and that your product is finding its demand. Conversion rate fluctuates based on the amount of products you sell; so, the higher the AOV, the lower the conversion rate. However, it needs to be stable. Based on your conversion rate, we’ll be able to find the right solution to stabilize it.
- AOV: When it comes to Average Order Value, we love business with AOVs ranging from $80 – $200. Businesses with low AOV (>$40) —usually those with subscription-based models–will need to have a really high LTV number to stabilize the equation.
- LTV: For “one and done” products, where customers do not have an opportunity to come back to the store and buy from you again, we want to make sure your AOV is high (above $500) and your conversion rate is consistent
- Visitors: The key to driving new traffic to the store is being laser focused on creating killer ads. Short form video needs to be prioritized on paid social channels…whereas Google Shopping ads and non-brand search ads should be prioritized on Paid Search channels. High performing email marketing and SMS marketing strategies should focus on bringing existing customers back to the store.
- VC: That is your cost of goods and fulfillment. You have to understand your unit economics and run at least a 40% margin ecommerce business. Shipping costs, fulfillment, COGS need to be controlled.
- nCaC: Understanding how much a new customer costs will help you to understand how healthy your current acquisition efforts are. This is a short and long term metric that you should look at frequently. We like to tie that number closely to AOV and LTV so that we can make sure there’s at least a break-even acquisition out the gates.
- MER: Your marketing efficiency rating will help you understand if you are underspending, overspending or are just where you should be in order to attain the appropriate pace for a profitable business. We typically like to see a 10-20% MER depending on the vertical and profit margins.
Top Things you should focus in 2023 in Ecommerce
As we head into the new year, here are a few of the key things you should focus on to help your business win.
- Short-Form Video
- Traffic – Find a way to get more traffic as it gets more expensive
- Efficiencies in Media
- First Party Data Growth
Looking to win this year?
Connect with us if you’re ready to take your business to the next level.
