The sheer amount of competition makes scaling one of the most difficult phases for an ecommerce brand. Get it wrong, and there are plenty of other options for your customers to choose. But get it right, and you can dominate the market, turn one-time buyers into long-term loyal customers, and build a marketing machine that works on autopilot. 

Here are five strategies you can implement easily to keep the momentum going:

1. Personalize Your Customer Experience

Post-2020, 75% of consumers have changed their go-to shopping style, the products they buy, and their preferred purchase method. When there are hundreds of stores selling similar products, you have to move beyond branding to differentiate yourself. The majority of the time, this means creating enjoyable, personalized experiences.

In fact, if you're not delivering personalized experiences, you risk frustrating customers who may otherwise be primed to make more purchases if you engage them the right way.

What’s more, you can generate up to 40% more revenue by creating a personalized customer experience compared to companies that are not yet using personalization. The cherry on top: 71% of customers expect you to provide a personalized experience. 

Here’s how to do it:

• Personalized product recommendations based on purchase history and browsing behavior
• Personalized emails, SMS, and push notifications
• Personalized coupons for cart abandonment
• Creating the right content for the customers

Skull Shaver, a brand that sells grooming products, saw an 18% increase in AOV and 27% in sales, in just one month, by using personalized product recommendations. Here’s how it displays “frequently bought together” items just below a product:

Once you apply this personalization in your communications with a customer, their lifetime value increases as they’re more likely to purchase – and purchase more, while they’re at it. It’s not always about the size of the discount you provide, but also the value you’re providing with the experience. That’s the key to having return customers.

2. Find Your Top 10% of Customers

The top 10% of customers are your superfans. These loyal, returning customers drive most of your revenue, love your product, and have a high LTV. Think of them in terms of Pareto’s 80/20 principle – 80% of your revenue is coming from the top 20% of your customers.

The problem: It’s difficult to find the top 10% of customers in the native Shopify app. But the pros outweigh the cons – once you identify these top customers, the repurchase rate will keep increasing and you’ll start to get more word-of-mouth recommendations.

Peel makes it easy for you to recognize these customers in just one click. With Audiences, you can segment your revenue data to find the top contributors. You can save the top 10% of customers and create a dashboard view to closely monitor trends. Then, apply what’s working for these customers to the rest of your audience.

We actually have a whole library of templates for Dashboards, Custom Reports and Audiences available in Peel (including a pre-made Audience template for your top 10% of customers).

3. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines (SEO)

Here’s the problem with SEO: You need to keep optimizing your website for every new Google update, every new product launch, any product updates, and more. SEO is not a one-and-done strategy. 

But the cost of missing out on the benefits of SEO is far too much to not consider implementing a search engine strategy: 75% of consumers say they’ve used Google to help with their shopping. That’s a large number of people resorting to search engines to ease their shopping experience.

The best part is your SEO efforts will compound over time as you scale your ecommerce store. Consistent efforts over 6-12 months have the potential to make your website your primary sales channel.

Start with the low-hanging fruit first: audit your website for any broken links, error codes, and low-optimized content.

Next, create content targeting long-tail keywords to acquire bottom-of-the-funnel customers. Long tail keywords refer to keywords that are more than four words long. They usually have low competition and the purchase intent is higher than short-tail keywords.

As you build momentum, you can slowly automate SEO processes to keep up with your growing store. 

4. Reward Customer Loyalty

As an ecommerce store owner, you probably have some expectations of your customers – frequent purchases, engagement, and referrals, for example. But value is a two-way street. Customers will only meet these expectations if you’re delivering equal, if not more, value in return.

So, once you have an engine of recurring customers, you need to find ways to reward their loyalty – be it in the form of a special discount, a free gift, or a gratitude email. 

MoxieLash, a cosmetics brand, was able to triple its repeat purchase rate and increase customer engagement by 700% by introducing loyalty points. The loyalty points encourage customers to stay with the brand instead of jumping ship.

5. Build a Community of Customers

Customer acquisition cost has increased by 70% from 2017 to 2022. This trend of an ever-increasing CAC is likely to continue in the future, making it increasingly difficult to acquire new customers without breaking the bank.

The solution is to increase the LTV of existing customers and provide a service that encourages word-of-mouth referrals. You can do this by creating a thriving community and encouraging audience interaction. 

Glossier is one of the best examples of how a community can drive sales. Glossier started as a beauty blog, building the foundation of the brand on the community itself. It still maintains its blog and regularly asks for feedback from its customers. 

For example, when creating one of its best-selling moisturizers, it asked for its customers’ input. Glossier wanted to package its products in jars but its customers had other ideas. The brand ended up going with its customers and creating its best-selling product to date:

Glossier also has a dedicated hashtag on Instagram (#GlossierGirl) where customers can post their own pictures and product hauls. The hashtag has over 23,000 posts:

Collecting user-generated content in this way unlocks a library of content you don’t have to create yourself. Your customers become influencers and you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on influencer marketing. Plus, UGC is more trusted than brand-created content—new audiences are more likely to trust a review from an existing customer over an influencer.

Zimba, a teeth whitening brand, curates customers’ videos on its Instagram profile, showing how real people are using its products:

Get the Data to Scale Your Ecommerce Business

The kicker is the above strategies won’t work without a system for keeping tabs on your data. How will you know which strategies are working? How will you know which strategies lead to the highest increase in revenue? How will you know which strategies didn’t work?

All these questions can be answered with key metrics and data. As a business owner working on scaling your ecommerce store, you don’t have time to aggregate data from different sources. And even then, some data is difficult to collect if you’re not using an app like Peel.

With Peel, you not only have easy access to data, but you can also see what that data means. This makes it far easier to determine which strategies are working and which could do with more work. 

‍Try Peel for free today.