3 Direct Marketing Growth Levers

When building an eCommerce business, it can be difficult to know where exactly you should be spending your time.

There are hundreds of marketing strategies you could pursue, but the last thing you want to do is minimize your efforts by spreading yourself too thin. 

In today's video, you'll learn about a simple process we use to identify & filter which strategies & ideas will add the most value to your operation. It all starts with understanding the three levers you can pull to increase revenue for your eCommerce business. 

On a high level, these are the only fundamental things you can do to grow your business.All of the other marketing ideas and strategies will impact one or more of these three levers. 

This means you can use them as a filter to help identify where you have the most opportunity to grow your business, with the least amount of effort.

Growth Lever #1 - Active Customer List

This tends to be the growth lever we focus on the most because it's the most obvious. The more customers you have, the more revenue you generate.

NOTE: We define an active customer as someone who has ordering activity with us in the last 12-months.

So, strategies that will help you build awareness and inspire people to make their first purchase, will have the most impact on this growth lever.

Strategy Ideas:

• Email Nurture Campaign
• Home Delivery / Shipping Program
• Refer-a-Friend Program

Growth Lever #2 - Average Purchase Rate

So this growth lever is the number of times your active customers place orders with you in a 12 month period. Here is where all of your loyalty strategies come into play. 

It's a lot of work to acquire a new customer, and all of that effort will go to waste if figure out how to inspire them to come back for repeat business.

Strategy Ideas:

• Loyalty / Points Program
• Email Newsletter
• Product Promotions

Growth Lever #3 - Average Order Size

This is the growth lever that is often overlooked the most, which means it's one of the easiest you can use to impact and create a quick growth win. 

The beautiful thing is that usually when you can convince a customer to buy more with each order, it creates operational efficiency because every order requires a certain amount of overhead to fulfill.

Strategy Ideas:

• Expanded Product Selection
• Order Minimums
• Incentivize Stock-Up Boxes

Conclusion

Increasing any one of these growth levers by the same percentage will generate the same amount of increased revenue for your business.

This means the key is to identify the strategies that you feel will have the most significant impact on one of these growth levers for the least amount of effort involved. Those are the areas you need to dedicate your precious time pursuing.

Each year, we will make goals for what we want each of these levers to look like, based on the strategies we are planning to implement. Which, is an easy way to ensure we are never left with goals without an execution plan.

If you've enjoyed this article please let us know by commenting below with the growth lever you believe you can increase by 25 % with the least amount of effort.