I’m an absolute idiot.
I have an ecommerce brand that I started at the very beginning of 2020 and have had great success every year since.
Covid helped A LOT with it gaining traction so it was profitable right out the gate. We hit almost $2-million in revenue in the first year alone.
But here’s where I made a huge mistake… I got lazy and complacent.
So much so that my only means of generating revenue and sales were through paid ads. And although my brand was able to stay profitable in the front end (we have low product costs and can scale without any major bottlenecks)… when Covid was finally declared over, we started seeing a MASSIVE decrease in profit even though our revenue was up due to rising ad costs.
See, the one thing I severely neglected (among other stuff), which is probably the most BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL thing for every business, was sending out promotional emails. In other words, I didn’t take advantage of the most valuable asset that my business has: my audience/customer base that I’ve already invested money in.
Yes, you read that right, I didn’t send out a SINGLE promotional email until this year. I was so content with the results I was getting from paid ads, I thought to myself, “Ehh, I’ll do emails later once I’ve grown my business more”.
But now email accounts for around 35% of my revenue, and we net 70% of the sales generated through these emails. I could operate at break even or at a loss in terms of acquisition, and our emails will more than make up for that. I’m basically just printing money at this point, and my open rate, click rate, and placed order rate are going up with each new campaign I send out.
There’s also nothing special about my emails. I literally just have my logo, a simple image with a promo code on it (made via a basic Canva template), and then about 4 - 5 lines of text talking about the promo and how they’ll be missing out if they don’t take advantage of it. That’s it. The area where I probably spend the most time is probably the subject line, but even that’s easy to do, just grab a swipe file of headlines and look for one that fits your brand, then plug your product in.
Of course, the money I “lost” is just an estimate based on my last year’s revenue, but still, just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach.
At the end of the day, success in ecommerce or in any industry, in my opinion, is really just about the fundamentals. You need to put in the groundwork by first creating or branding a product that fulfills a need/want in your niche, promote the hell out of it through paid ads/posts, and then cultivate a relationship with the audiences you’ve built through these channels.
Anyone who tells you otherwise or that there’s a secret sauce/formula to starting a successful business is just trying to take advantage of your naivety and make money off you.
But yeah, if there’s one takeaway from this post, please don’t make the same mistake I did and neglect promotional emails. I know if you’re just starting out it may seem like it’s not even worth it with a small or no audience, but if I could start over and do one thing different, it would be sending out emails at the very start. I can’t stress how important emails (and I would extend this and say social media content as well) are.
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Consider posting this to the other business sub, which I am intentionally not naming.
This subreddit is full of broccoli-haired, snot-nosed kids who joined after watching guru videos on tiktok. These comments are ridiculous, but totally on par. The other sub has a better adult:child ratio
Yeah, that’s what it seems like. I’m glad I’m not a regular poster here. Feels like my brain is gonna rot just interacting with some of these guys. They don’t even have basic reading comprehension down and they think they can be entrepreneurs? It’s actually quite comical.
It’s marginally better
Genuinely what is the name of this other sub pls… I need to join
A successful business is long term sustainability- a marathon. Not a 100m sprint. Buckle down and focus…
Wow this is incredibly interesting because my e-com brand has exploded recently with Google Ads and I keep thinking I’ll get set up with an email campaign company at some point but it’s never been a priority. I didn’t think it would be that successful to be honest, I barely open any promo emails.
DO IT.
But even though my emails have decent metrics, it’s still a tiny fraction of people actually buying from these emails at any given time.
Hence why it still makes money every time I send it out. A small segment will buy today, tomorrow, and the day after, then when I send another email, a different small segment will buy. So on and so forth.
It’s normal for email to account for 30% of revenue.
I run growth for 8-10 figure brands and we see 20-30% from email/sms
!RemindMe in 7 days
tldr: In summary, you run a successful e-commerce brand that initially relied heavily on paid ads. You later realized the importance of email marketing, which significantly boosted your revenue and profits. This experience taught you the value of utilizing your customer base and the importance of basic marketing strategies like email campaigns and social media content in e-commerce.
Same thing here. I run meta ads only and have been averaging about 1-2 emails per month. Nowhere near enough. I do work full time outside of my business but it’s no excuse. Rising ad costs have been devastating. We will likely lose 100k this year.
Yeah man, it’s actually crazy. So last year, our ads were profitable from after Father’s Day until basically the end of the year (at 2 ROAS and above). This year? We’d be lucky to have a 1.5 ROAS during any of these times.
I thought things would flip once November started, but nope, I’ve had down days a few times this month. But emails have carried me and kept me profitable even with my ads doing horrible.
Can you give someone some advice for starting out? How to find or research niche etc…?
Honestly, best advice I can give is to either look at the industries and niches that you’re already a part of, or just look at some of the ads that appear on your social media feed.
What hobbies do you have? Is there anything that you wished you had for your hobbies that aren’t currently available? Or maybe they do exist, but don’t quite fill the need/want you have. Could you capitalize on that?
That one is a bit more limited since you’re looking at your own experiences. But… what I’ve found works best is to just scroll through Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and actually look at the ads that are being shown to you.
That’s how I came across my current business idea. I saw an ad in my feed and I thought to myself, “I can do better than them”. And whaddayaknow, I ended up doing better than them.
If you do find an ad that interests you, start searching around for reviews about that company or similar products, there’ll be a theme across the complaints/negative reviews you see which are an opportunity for you to capitalize on.
Extremely refreshing to see some actual entrepreneurship advice on the sub for a change. Thank you!
You’re very welcome!
What exactly are your email open rates at now? Do you use click-baity subject lines?
58% currently. And that’s up from the 30% open rate I used to get. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re all click-baity… but some of them are.
One of them was a variation of the famous “Do you make these mistakes in English” headline. I of course reworded it so it was related to a mistake that my customers make during this holiday season, but I actually had some useful info in it so it wasn’t 100% clickbait. It also wasn’t 0% clickbait either tho lol.
What has worked extremely well for me is doing a 3-step email campaign during any major holiday.
I’ll have a “PRE” discount that’s emailed to my customers and I’ll say something like “Get access to our holiday sale before everyone else”, then the next one is on the day of the holiday where it just says “In celebration of ____, get 30% off”, and the final one is “Last Chance: Get 30% off your order” on the day after the holiday.
All 3 emails have the same content, it’s just the subject line that’s different each time.
This whole thing reads like a promotional email
Well, that’s all I’ve been thinking about these past few months so the way I type is very “promotional email-y”.
See, the one thing I severely neglected (among other stuff), which is probably the most BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL thing for every business, was sending out promotional emails.
Stopped reading here.
Email campaigns are overrated.
Totally depends on the business. It was 35% of my income for my digital products business.
You’re so right. Hold on, let me stop the thing that’s generating 35% of my revenue because you said it’s overrated. Thanks!
I’m trying to get into e-commerce. It’s really giving me a fight & I’m not getting anywhere. Any tips you can share? Any YouTube channels you can recommend that you feel have attributed to any of your success? Anyone else who has tips please feel free to share. I’m struggling & really want this
Not sure what the point in this post is except humble brag? You want to remind us to send emails to our customers? lol. You’re very lucky to start when you did if you make such basic business errors.
I mean, you can think it’s a humble brag post, hell, you can think whatever you want, I’m not gonna police your thoughts. But if you honestly think that a lot of business owners don’t make basic business errors, then you clearly haven’t talked to many actual business owners.
I speak to business owners all day and am one. Who would run a d2c brand and not send marketing emails?
Well, it’s good advice. I went years without sending emails. I just didn’t know.
That’s nothing, I’ve lost out on billions based on all the things I didn’t do that I could have…