Your Business Is At Risk
Facebook & Google Are Planning To Stop Giving You Data
Big changes are coming to your ownership of user data. Data that you’ve been paying for…
In the form of traffic to your website.
In the form of customer data when they place an order.
In the form of emails that you capture when they land on your website.
In e-commerce, first-party data is your oxygen – without it, you will suffocate.
The truth is you’ve become over-reliant.
Over-reliant on results from Google & Facebook advertising.
Over-reliant on their targeting capabilities that get weaker with every Apple update.
Over-reliant on their addictive ability to scale much more rapidly than anything else you have tried.
You’re not alone, I have been there.
I used to spend over £3m per year on paid media marketing, with 80% of that budget going to Facebook Ads alone.
Because of this, I know where the future is heading for these two giants – and the truth is, it will be devastating for small and growing businesses.
In 2020 I took a pretty regular call from our Facebook marketing rep, he offered to put our account on a new Beta for a product coined as Facebook Commerce.
In short – your entire customer experience will soon belong to Facebook – they no longer want to send traffic to your e-commerce website. They want to keep users in the app to buy your products. Facebook will handle everything, from browsing to purchasing using your product feed to taking payments using Facebook Payments. Your website will become irrelevant.
As you can see, this will be bad, but the cherry on the cake that will kill your business?
Facebook is planning to take a commission on your sales just like Amazon does, and in return, you will get no customer data.
No more traffic to your website.
No more email addresses (for signups or purchases).
Just an anonymized Facebook email address and shipping details of where to send the order.
The only way you will be able to target your customers is by coughing up more budget to the Facebook ad machine.
Your margins can’t take this – it’s not sustainable.
The race to the bottom is about to get a whole lot worse.
That is why I have created this plan. There is still time to build & leverage your first-party data. To take ownership of your growth whilst Facebook & Google are still useful advertising products. But you have to act fast if you want to beat the curve, and the clock is ticking.
Like a surfer preparing to catch a wave – those too late will wipe out. Can you afford to wipe out?
If you’d like to learn how we are capturing 15-25% of website visitors’ email addresses and turning them into an average of £37,000 in revenue per week for our clients please book a call
5 Pillar Shopify Growth Plan
Risk-Free Profit at Scale to 7-Figure Sales & Beyond
This 5-step program will grow your Shopify revenue profitably without risk.
In just 5 simple steps we have grown eCommerce businesses by over 200% in 12 months, breaking them into 7-figure sales with a proven framework that snowballs with growth.
With no venture capital or external investment, we have scaled self-sustaining eCommerce retailers to as much as £60m revenue – whilst maintaining a minimum 15% EBITDA – in as little as 3 years.
This plan was built for but is NOT EXCLUSIVE to Shopify – it will work on any platform.
Regardless of your product, size, budget, skillset, or team, this strategy was written to give you all the tools you need, in priority order, to profitably scale your e-commerce business to 7-figures and beyond without taking serious risks.
If you like what you read in this guide but would like us to handle it for you, contact the team at Digital Surface to sign up for our fully managed 5 Pillar Shopify Growth Plan.
Our Mission:
90 days or less to risk-free profitable success. Digital Surface proven 5 pillar growth plan is a flywheel for profitable growth. Our mission is to freely share this method and the benefits of implementing concise systems that compound growth for e-commerce businesses to get the best results for our clients.
Pillar 1: Increasing RPV
Introduction to RPV
RPV (Revenue Per Visit) is a heavily underutilized metric in e-commerce. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) or Average Order Value (AOV) takes the limelight in most e-commerce growth articles, but what they often fail to mention is that the true KPI you are working to improve when aiming to drive revenue is RPV.
RPV is the average amount of revenue your store makes for every visitor over a given period. Conversion rate doesn’t mean anything without conversion value. You can double your conversion rate by dropping your prices enough, it is only a success if your revenue, or ideally profit per session increases as a result.
RPV is calculated as Total Revenue divided by Total Sessions to work out an average of how much revenue is made per session on your website. It is the best thing to measure because it takes into account both revenue and conversion rate. Recognizing that increasing one to the detriment of the other can cause a decline in revenue is incredibly important.
Why it is Important to Increase RPV First
Most rapid growth strategies you read online begin with jumping straight into advertising and paid media tactics, which is a great option for scaling if you are happy with your profit, RPV & customer lifetime value.
However, if you are not happy with these metrics, this will be the primary reason for your stunted growth efforts. This is why Digital Surface will always opt for executing quick wins here before jumping to new advertising tactics.
Perhaps you are already utilizing paid media channels, but you’re struggling to grow your spend and scale profitably. Does this sound familiar?
Until you have fully optimized your RPV quick wins, the reality is that you are filling a leaking bucket that will always struggle to scale to its potential.
How to Increase RPV – The Quick Wins
Learn a little and implement massively. Whilst reading this section I strongly recommend that you implement these tactics massively to generate value for your business.
Are you currently measuring RPV as a KPI?
Do you know how to?
If you need help with this, contact Digital Surface and we’ll have you tracking RPV for free today.
Now you know that increasing RPV is a balancing act between increasing AOV and improving CRO (click for helpful guides on both), you’re ready to create a solid testing plan filled with tactics to increase both of the above metrics is the next step.
If you are running low on time you can enquire about our Quick Win RPV Testing Plan. We have an extensive 100-point e-commerce optimization checklist with your name on it. Book a call with me and I will personally walk you through it (no strings attached).
Where possible, it is recommended that you use an AB Testing Tool or App to conduct these experiments. Check out this article for some of the best AB Testing Shopify apps to help you with this.
Several environmental factors such as stock availability, market demand, and even weather can impact CR, AOV, and thus RPV depending on what happened in each period. That’s why it’s important to use proper AB test software to validate that changes made are resulting in growth rather than invisible market factors.
Now go out there and get testing! Just remember that, before making any changes, you must be tracking your current RPV as a baseline for you to be able to improve on. As Peter Drucker once said, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it!
Top Tip: When making any changes to your website it is strongly recommended that you keep a backup that you can roll back to if results do not go as intended. Rolling back gives you that sanity check any time you are unsure of test results, and is a nice fallback option to have. For this, we recommend the Rewind Backups app for Shopify.
Pillar 2: Increasing cLTV
Introduction to cLTV
Customer Lifetime Value (cLTV) is hailed as a key metric in long-term business growth.
Did you know, it is eight times cheaper to generate additional revenue from your existing customers than it is to acquire a new one?
It is so important that investors maintain a keen interest in this metric when looking to invest in any business.
To avoid repeating better content out there, here is a full guide on Customer Lifetime Value.
Why it is Important to Increase cLTV NOW
We promised you profitable growth without risk, and this starts with getting the most out of your existing customer database. Additional profit generated through maximizing RPV and now cLTV will fund all of the other tactics discussed later on in the plan.
The best part is, by starting with these two steps, all gains generated by the consequential steps in the plan will benefit from your hard work. Laying the correct foundations will amplify your profitable growth. This creates the snowballing effect mentioned and allows you to scale rapidly without running into obstacles later on.
Ideally, as you grow, you will have dedicated internal teams or agencies working full-time on each pillar in this plan to drive efficiencies at scale and consistently optimize the bottom line.
How to Increase cLTV – The Quick Wins
On paper, it sounds simple. The key to increasing cLTV is through providing an excellent customer experience on their purchases, as well as using customer data to expand and improve your offering or services.
But the reality is a challenging practice that requires careful and considered management across the entire business, at all steps in the customer journey, from brand marketing campaigns & managing customer feedback & reviews, right through to operations, packaging & logistics.
The more customer data you are collecting, the easier it will be for you to increase your customer lifetime value. This is a huge topic discussed in more detail in Pillar 3. For now, though, we will focus on the data that you have already, transactional data.
The good news is that you’re in great hands, Shopify is an excellent platform for increasing cLTV as it houses all of your customer data in one easy-to-access place for taking action.
The Shopify home screen even highlights promising customer segments using past data on their purchases and actions and even uses them to power predictive algorithms for you to export and target with media.
The quick wins for increasing customer lifetime value are as follows:
RFM Segmentation & Tactics:
RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary and is about your customer’s order history. Recency is how long ago their most recent order was. Frequency is how often they purchase from you. Monetary is their total lifetime value to your business minus refunds.
Each letter (RFM) can be calculated in excel if you are on a tight budget, but preferably using a Shopify App like Omniconvert Reveal (which comes with a 14-day free trial) can be powerful as it is dynamic and allows you to execute tactics in real-time across platforms like email, paid social, push notification, or SMS.
Once calculated each customer will be assigned to a Scorecard Segment referring to their RFM behavior. For example, a 555 score (top marks for R, F & M). These are then clustered into 11 contextual segments based on their behavior. The 555 would represent your best customers, or “Soulmates” as shown in the segment groupings below.
Like with RPV, it is good to look at monetary at a gross revenue level, as well as at a profit (margin) level, as it might turn out that some of your highest-value customers buy a lot of low-margin goods, or return lots of items if you are in clothing or beauty which can put a misleading emphasis on their real value to your business.
By calculating RFM and clustering your customer base into the above segments you can see where the value lies within your database, both in terms of volume (share of customers) and profit (share of margin).
Of course, this exercise is useless unless you can act on it with media tactics. You’ll be pleased to know that RFM data is incredibly actionable as it is derived at the individual customer level, meaning you can explicitly target people by using their email address, or mobile number to send emails, SMS, or target them through Facebook campaigns, and even on-site overlays and promotions.
You will need to devise a tactical plan that suits your business and your customer base, but here are some ideas with a brief explanation that you should look to implement as soon as possible to increase your customer lifetime value.
A Triggered Email or Flow Series when someone becomes an ex-lover is your quickest win, these customers used to be lovers or soulmates but they are becoming cold. When designing these flows I like to run a quick survey to the segment to understand why they went cold in the
first place. You can also drill down into products that segment typically purchases from you and if you have the margin available, give them an offer they can’t refuse on products relevant to their history. You could even look to introduce them to a subscription model or a loyalty scheme that rewards them for being a good customer. Most loyal customers leave a brand because they do not feel valued or become bored of having the same experience. The benefit of making this an automated flow is that it will trigger again if they fall cold, and for any current lovers that fall cold in the future!
Potential lovers are showing promising signs of becoming a lover or soulmate customer. They love your brand and are ordering frequently but perhaps their average order value is low, or they do not purchase quite frequently enough. Implementing a loyalty scheme or rewarding them for purchasing at a higher average order value or more frequently can be an incredibly rewarding tactic, and again you can introduce this using website targeting on their next visit, or through SMS, email, or paid social ads by using the customer data to target them. Another prime candidate for a subscription offering if applicable to your business.
New passion is another great segment for quick wins. The new passion segment is recent customers with high monetary value and low frequency (e.g. 505, 515). This means that they have recently placed a high-value order, but perhaps it was only their first or second purchase with you. Nurtured correctly, these customers can easily become lovers or soul mates. These customers deserve special treatment and to be made to feel like royalty as they have put a lot of faith into your brand and also shown you that they have a lot of money for such experiences!
I have yet to find an eCommerce retailer who tailors their email welcome journey based on how high their first purchase value was, but I can guarantee that if you walk into a new store for the first time and spend a considerable amount of money, you would leave feeling very valued and special, and return many times. This is the exact behavior you want to encourage online.
Loyalty Program & Subscription Models:
As mentioned already in RFM (which is the strategy behind increasing LTV) Loyalty Programs and Subscription Models are two incredibly strong tactics for enabling desired LTV behaviors such as purchase frequency and monetary value. They give you an edge on the competition, raise average order values, and increase loyalty (it’s not just a clever name).
Loyalty Lion & YotPo are two well-rounded and versatile Shopify apps that help with customer loyalty programs by offering rewards and benefits to loyal customers, such as loyalty points, exclusive perks, and discounts. I prefer YotPo as it can be paired with their SMS, UGC, and Customer Review platforms to create a highly engaging experience where customers can be
rewarded for engaging with your brand and helping other customers, turning them into advocates, and sending your conversion rates to the moon!
With loyalty, you can reward any desired behavior and it also encourages customers to log in to your website which enriches your first-party data and customer identification rates. For those of you who don’t know, this is the silver bullet we’ve all been looking for to combat the abolishment of third-party cookies, as it allows us to track customer behavior ourselves without relying on third-party tracking scripts.
Subscription models are a fantastic way to drive consistent business but only serve verticals that command frequent purchases such as fashion, skincare, groceries, or pet supplies. Do you have any products that could be offered on a subscription model? Or perhaps flexible financing that would encourage incremental business from aspiring customers who cannot afford your product upfront?
Another option is offering a delivery or logistics subscription or having a paid loyalty tier that gives cashback or better rewards than your standard program, such as pre-sale and early access for loyal customers willing to pay extra.
Track NPS to Go Above & Beyond & Drive Growth:
On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? You’ve probably been asked this question a few times throughout your lifetime, and for good reason. There is a striking correlation between growth and companies with positive
NPS scores, and to paraphrase Peter Drucker’s earlier quote, if it isn’t measured it can’t be improved!
For full information on how to track NPS, you can view the Net Promoter Score Calculation Guide on Survey Monkey. Simply put, those who score a 9 or 10 are considered to be your “promoters” and true happy advocates of your business who will actively share their experiences with friends or peers.
7 & 8 are considered passives who are content with your service or product but would not consider it so good that they would actively tell their friends or peers about it. The kind of people who might say a good word if prompted or explicitly asked about your brand if it came up.
0-6 are all considered detractors who are unhappy with some or all aspects of your business and services, they would be considered as willing to damage your reputation either actively or if asked explicitly to comment.
Your NPS survey scores are then ranked on a range of -100 to +100 where -100 would indicate that all of your survey respondents are detractors, and +100 would indicate that all are promoters.
As not all industries are created alike and serve varying functions regarding consumer sentiment (I am yet to find a debt collection agency with a glowing NPS) it is important to use industry NPS benchmarking to understand how leaders in your space are performing, though beware that some companies inflate their scores by only asking their best customers, or asking at points of delight in the customer journey.
Companies like EE have been known to reward their staff based on their personal NPS rating after dealing with customers in-store, I have been asked in the past to purposely give them a 9 or 10 so that they can get their bonus, or worse, not fired!
Companies that cheat their NPS score are only really cheating themselves. A vital part of the survey is the question box that follows asking the customer why they chose that score, and what the company could do to increase them to a 9 or 10 in the future, or if they already scored a 9 or 10, it’s good to ask what they love most and how could the brand go above and beyond that.
This feedback is invaluable for genuinely improving your product or services, and so asking all customers regardless of where they are in the customer journey gives a raw and unfiltered insight into the customer experience at all stages so that you can isolate problem areas, such as
customer service, product quality, or logistics, and convert customers into advocates who will market your brand for you in their spare time.
Surprising and delighting existing customers significantly increases referrals by word of mouth and creates excellent content and stories for your brand to advertise in prospecting campaigns to lookalike audiences and people with similar interests to your ideal customer. It is a
well-known fact that good reviews, testimonials, and stories serve as incredibly powerful social proof which is an essential prospecting and sales tactic.
Let’s Take a Moment to Recap
Before we proceed onto Pillar 3 you should have noticed changes to both RPV and cLTV within your business.
Now is a great time to reflect on those efforts and ask yourself whether there is more that can be done to improve your gross profit or revenue using the information given in Pillar 1 & Pillar 2.
Successful & profitable business growth hinges on consistently working to reduce costs whilst increasing sales, ensuring that ideally both of these activities increase customer satisfaction and net promoter score by successful management on the 3 M’s (Money, Minutes & Manpower).
LEAN process management is an excellent tool for cutting business costs. Take time to document all of the main processes within your business step by step. Going through each process, carefully highlight every step, or in some cases, the entire process, that your customer would not willingly pay money for. LEAN process management aims to identify ways in which you can eliminate these steps or processes and save on any or all of the 3 M’s, as they are not bringing direct value to your end product or user.
Some processes will be essential to business function even though a customer would not necessarily be willing to pay for them. Basic office admin like refilling a printer is a required process that a customer would not pay for, but as an example, you could automate some of this process by ordering the paper in bulk at a discount rather than ad hoc (saving money and minutes).
It would be wise to review all processes annually as advances in technology and equipment are frequent and can save a lot of time and money.
If you have not managed to increase your RPV & cLTV, or you have and your profit has not increased, contact the team at Digital Surface for a free no-obligation profit health check where we will go through everything you have done together to date and help you to scale.
Before proceeding, you should be seeing improvements across your profit and revenue figures. You must step back and analyze now before proceeding, as all further growth steps will require investing your profits to grow further.
Pillar 3: Customer Research & Insights
Introduction to Customer Research & Insights
In an ideal world, research should always be a marketer’s first step before acting on anything, but having held senior positions myself and also working with many smaller businesses I know firsthand that this is not a realistic approach.
Market and customer research is a guiding beacon for your strategy and tactical execution, it gives you the data required to create a market segmentation, which in turn allows you to define your targeting and positioning strategy. Upon determining your targeting and positioning you can go on to create an informed integrated marketing strategy across the 4 Ps (product, price, place & promotion) to ensure that your approach to business is market (or at the very least customer) oriented.
The problem is that market research is a cost that does not directly yield a return on investment, something small businesses tend to be petrified of. But a well-informed marketing strategy based on market research is invaluable, and already puts you leagues above competitors your size who will likely be running blind and reactively rather than proactively. Market and customer research keeps you focussed on the thing that matters most, what customers actually want, rather than what you think they want. Whilst not yielding a direct ROI, surely you can see that it forms a catalyst for significant business growth.
On top of this, if profit is a consistent problem for your business, either due to market saturation (yes, I’m talking to every fast fashion brand) or simply due to undervaluing your product or services, the right research can fix that, and guide you out of your current rut by highlighting market opportunities for profitable expansion into new markets, new product, or for the brave, both!
Why it is Important to do Research Now
The biggest and best brands invest millions in market research every year to ensure that they are always at the forefront of every opportunity. Understanding the market as well as your customers gives you the ability to achieve incredible things because you have a clear and holistic view of the market.
Brands that do their research can create highly relevant and targeted brand campaigns that deliver results, whilst delivering pioneering new products that the market wants, all the while growing more market share by acquiring new customers and keeping existing customers happy.
I have chosen to make research pillar number 3 as by now we have already grown profit through strategic choices backed with limited research, you should now have the funding to go out and obtain enough customer and market research to grow your brand significantly. It is this approach that will take you from being reactive to trends and demand to being proactive to trends and creating your demand. From responding to cause and effect to causing the effect in your market.
How to Obtain Customer Insights & Market Research
Research Methods
To get customer and market-level data into your business you will need to conduct research. The two main methods of research you will need to conduct fall into two categories known as Qualitative & Quantitative research.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research methods such as focus groups or ethnography are the best place to start your journey. With the rise of Zoom and other video conferencing software, it has never been more simple or cost-effective to run focus groups.
To ensure that your research is statistically valid, you will need to make sure that you recruit a representative sample of the market that you are trying to understand in more detail, and this can be achieved by hiring a market research agency to screen and select candidates for you.
In a Focus Group session, it is essential that you have a good moderator who can control the group and keep it on topic, and it is also important to make sure that they are given a good set of qualitative questions for you to gather data on based upon key business questions that you need to be answered.
For more information on Qualitative Research, I strongly recommend reading through this article from OptinMonster (another great Shopify app) which explores the pros and cons and will arm you with enough information to start your journey.
Quantitative Research
Qualitative data on its own is fluffy, it tells you a story but without being backed by Quantitative research it has no commercial value or meaning. If what you get from Qualitative research is a lot of opinions, what you are aiming to understand through Quantitative methods is how popular they are within the market and which segments hold those opinions.
Your findings in Qual will be used to power the questions in your Quant which gives you a powerful tool as you will now be measuring the right things, if you had just jumped right into Quant before Qual you would essentially face the risk of asking and measuring the wrong things based on your own opinions which are not at all market-oriented.
By measuring the right opinions of the right market you can begin to paint a picture. The 3 types of data you will begin to collect through Quant surveys will be broken down into 3 main categories: Demographic, Attitudinal, and Behavioral. Simply put, who they are, what they think about the market and its products, and how they act within that market and with the products.
For more information on Quantitative Research and conducting market and customer surveys please read through this article from Question Pro. Tools like SurveyMonkey are incredibly
cost-effective, and you can even use SurveyMonkey to buy contacts who represent your market to complete your survey for you.
Wrapping Up
After pairing Qual & Quant research methods you will be able to move on to the holy trinity of marketing, which is Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning. The data you derive from your final Quant survey can be used to create a full market segmentation which will allow you to decide on your Targeting & Positioning strategy within each target segment. From this, you can set goals based on increasing your market share within those segments and have a clear understanding of what your business needs to do to do this.
Pillar 4: Customer Acquisition
Introduction to Customer Acquisition
So your cLTV is well optimized, and you now have a wealth of market research and information that is going to help you grow. If you’ve been doing your homework you will now also have a full market segmentation which you have now decided on which segment(s) you will be targeting, and also what your positioning is going to be within that segment.
Now that you have done all of this, it would be wise to go back to research again and hire another focus group within your chosen target segments and ask them questions about your positioning strategy and whether they would buy your products or services based on this.
It’s a great acid test to have, and if you have continued further with your marketing strategy as far as your choices in the marketing mix (4Ps) you can start to get feedback on those choices before committing to anything too.
By being market-oriented to this degree, you are in a prime position to be acquiring new customers.
You now have everything you need to feed your media tactics and branding and messaging strategy, because you know exactly who you are talking to, what they want and need, and also exactly where they spend their time, what media they consume, what brands and competitors they are shopping with and also what they like and dislike about their experiences within the market.
Why it is Important to Do Acquisition Now
If you have come this far, I can guarantee that you are now in the top 1% of Shopify stores concerning your preparation and approach to marketing and growth. It is astounding how few businesses (including successful ones) invest in market research to guide their marketing strategy. Most choose to fly blind and invest 90% of their marketing budget in their media channels such as Google & Facebook ads with no clue who their customers are, what they think about their brand, or what they want from future experiences.
You are now armed with everything you need to create highly targeted and powerful campaigns with strong and relevant messaging, selling the right product, to the right people, in the right way, and in the right place. The ignorance that is shown by your competitors serves as a huge tactical advantage to your brand, and now your investments will pay off significantly by way of much greater campaign performance metrics, such as CPA, ROAS, ROI, and Volume of New Customers Acquired.
What’s more, your efforts in the first two pillars will now ensure that the customers you acquire now will generate a higher RPV/PPV and have an increased cLTV which means more profit and revenue will be available for you to use for growth, either through more media investment for bigger campaigns, or through further product developments that, with the help of your market research, will be incredibly successful.
Customer Acquisition Quick Wins
The quick wins section for this pillar will be quite vague as your quick wins largely depend on the findings in your research. The channels you should be using, the messaging strategy, product and pricing, and also promotions should all be defined within your unique marketing strategy prepared in pillar 3.
That being said, here are some helpful tips that I have found in my experience growing other brands:
A Consistent Customer Experience:
Do not undervalue the power of a consistent customer experience. The most successful brands are consistent with their messaging, pricing, service, and promotions across all their channels. Ensure your retail stores offer the same experience to your online customers and that all of your
marketing partners (such as affiliates) promote the same offers you have on your website or in-store.
If you run a 10% off your first order offer, be persistent with that messaging across all channels that a new customer may come across, and make the code super easy for them to remember like “HELLO” or “WELCOME” to maximize conversion rates.
Exclude Existing Customers:
Most online media channels are highly effective at segmentation now, so you can upload customer lists or use pixel rules on Facebook and Google to exclude known customers from receiving adverts intended for new customers.
This is effective as it keeps messaging relevant and also means you can keep a close eye on how much you are spending on new customer acquisition at a campaign level. This also helps with setting KPIs and your expectations of results, as new customer acquisition campaigns rarely perform as well as existing customer campaigns.
This also helps with leveraging AI bidding algorithms, as you can set things like a Target CPA or Target ROAS to ensure that results are in line with what you can afford or are aiming to spend. Remember to use your Customer Lifetime Value when trying to work out your Target CPA to ensure that you remain profitable, or at least know how long it will take to break even.
Use Affiliates, Influencers & Partners:
These are some extremely powerful customer acquisition methods as they allow you to tap into new and relevant audiences relating to your products or services. Remember the research module we discussed? Go back and ask your audience what pages they follow, or what partners and other brands they frequently shop with.
CoBranding or influencer collaborations are extremely powerful ways to take your product or services to new audiences, and they also add a huge layer of credibility to what you do, and can often result in earned media coverage through digital PR if you work with someone high profile.
TV is Now More Targeted Than Ever:
Sky has recently rolled out a new programmatic television advertising platform called AdSmart which is an absolute game-changer for television media buying. Just like digital display and programmatic media, you can target based on a wealth of attributes such as Experian Mosaic,
Mastercard Data, Demographics, Interests, and Behavioural. What’s more, you are only billed if 75% of your advert is viewed, and ads are only served if the remote was interacted with in the last 30 minutes.
Television advertising is still quite expensive on a CPM when compared to Facebook or Google (about 3x more), but you cannot deny that it is far more credible, with your brand being shown among some of the most well-known brands in the world. It is also a much better storytelling ad format with sound always on, and much more convincing viewability metrics than digital.
You can also deploy Nielsen tags on your website and Sky can tell you exactly how many visits and conversions your advert drove, so TV is now just as measurable, or maybe even more measurable than Facebook or Google.
Pillar 5: Building & Maintaining a Brand
Introduction to Building & Maintaining a Brand
By far the most difficult pillar, but I saved this one for last as it is surprising how few successful businesses have a good and solid brand. I have therefore concluded that this is the only
non-essential pillar, however, those businesses which are hyper-successful, or significantly punch above their weight for their size and see the most rapid growth of all always have strong brands.
The strongest brands on Shopify that significantly punch above their weight are Gymshark & Lounge Underwear and both excel for several reasons, but to keep things short and sweet, I will discuss what I consider to be the main factors of successful brand building that they use.
What is a Brand?
By definition, a brand is a name given to a product and/or service such that it takes on an identity by itself.
More importantly, it is how your brand is perceived in the mind of your prospect rather than the reality of what your brand is to you. A good measure of this is to ask what would people say about your brand, or how they would describe it when you are not in the room.
Perceptual maps are an excellent way of plotting brands within a market on a two or
three-dimensional map so that you can visually see them alongside one another. Tracking movements on a perceptual map over time will also determine how successful your branding campaigns are at molding the perceptions of the market toward your intended positioning.
Why is Brand Important?
Brand Equity. The price difference that people are prepared to pay between the unbranded commodity equivalent of what you sell and the branded product that you sell. Not only the value but also how likely your target segment is to choose your brand over the unbranded commodity or a competing brand.
It’s important to pay attention to the ‘target segment’ part of that last statement, as your brand should not be targeted at everybody if it wishes to be truly successful, as branding is about who you are not just as much as who you are for.
Remaining focused on serving your segment will pay dividends over sitting on the fence and trying to appeal to everyone. If you’d like a larger portion of the market, create sub or new brands to scale, just like Unilever & P&G.
Too many brands alienate their core by trying to broaden their horizons, this rarely pays off.
Why it is Important to Build a Brand Now
As mentioned above it is those businesses that have strong, well-thought-out, and successful branding that achieve the best levels of growth. Now that you have all of your data and market research it is much easier and a lot safer for you to make a market-oriented decision with regards to your brand strategy. In essence, you can be sure now that you are building something that is relevant and meets the demands of the market.
“In its simplest form, business is about solving a problem that resonates with your segment”
Building a brand comes with huge benefits. For starters, studies have shown that brand is the single largest contributing factor to paid media ROI. Not only that but building brand equity is the best way to achieve sustainable growth and increase long-term profits.
Within the last couple of decades, Nike has gone from selling £50 trainers to £100-£200+ footwear. By investing in high-profile celebrity endorsements, they built enough brand equity and demand for their products to transition their business to a wholesale model. This was genius as it allowed them to focus all of their budget on brand building and product development.
Short-term direct marketing (which is competitive and yields a much lower ROI) became the sole responsibility of the businesses buying their wholesale product. Nike can now focus all of its marketing budgets on long-term brand-building efforts, giving them an enormous financial advantage over competitors, whilst also being able to command higher prices for their foot and activewear which continue to climb every year, creating more profit to continue to feed the cycle.
How to Build a Brand – What Others Do Well
As mentioned earlier in the chapter, two of the strongest brands using the Shopify platform are Lounge Underwear and Gymshark. For this section, I will now go into what I think these two brands excel at when it comes to building their brand awareness as well as brand equity and perception.
Gymshark
Gymshark has achieved rapid growth as a pure-play eCommerce retailer in a short period. Their timing along with their product development strategy are two key factors contributing to their insane levels of growth. Gymshark even had a customer insider program to maintain a connection with the voice of their customer, who they define as highly engaged social media users who want to achieve their goals without fashion getting in the way. Their seamless leggings are an iconic staple in their range that has delivered considerable revenue to the brand.
Gymshark has such a clear mission, and it is stated clearly on its homepage and is reinforced across all of its brand lead media campaigns. A clear mission and vision is essential, it helps your target market know that you are right for them, and ideally align with their aspirations and interests.
The second thing Gymshark does incredibly well is consistency across design, they have a very clear branding guideline that they stick to across channels. A good brand guideline will detail everything from colour pallet to logo spacing and typography to ensure consistency. Brand codes such as colours, logos, audio, slogans, and fonts make a huge difference to brand awareness and brand recall metrics in media campaigns which are all key brand-building metrics. It’s also easy to tell a Gymshark advert based on photography style used alone, they even keep the gym sets that they use for campaigns consistent to help with awareness and recall.
The final thing on Gymshark is their use of influencer and partner marketing. Gymshark has managed to build a hugely aspirational brand that attracts the top influencers organically now as their product and branding is so desirable, but this is something that has been built up over years of investment in influencer and partner relationships by sponsoring amateur athletes and bodybuilders since their inception. Gymshark does well with storytelling and shining the spotlight on stories and people that resonate and inspire their target audience, none of this would have
been possible without consistent customer and market research, and a huge passion for their image at board level.
Lounge Underwear
It’s no lie that sex sells, Lounge’s tagline of “comfort made sexy” is the epitome of strong brand positioning. Before Lounge, Calvin Klein was probably the only brand that could claim the title of women’s underwear that was comfortable and desirable – the brand was sexy but their underwear wasn’t.
Enter Lounge, who had found the perfect gap in the market at a time when being comfortable and lounging was becoming a rising culture among women in their early 20s. Partner this with the rise of Instagram (the platform where everything is overtly sexual) and you have a perfect product-market fit, with a generation of customers who are obsessed with looking sexy online and sharing it with the world.
Every product that Lounge sells is heavily branded with their logo which is conveniently their brand name in block capitals. We’ve seen it before with Calvin Klein and Nike products, but the branded elastic making its way from nano to micro, to macro, to hyper influencers was truly key to the success at Lounge.
Another thing Lounge got very right early on was the use of expensive and high-end fast fashion models used by the likes of PrettyLittleThing and Oh Polly. The models themselves have huge followings, and on top of that, were prime candidates as ambassadors for the products themselves, and took to their social media channels to post themselves wearing the brand.
Creating value by association is an enormous factor in growing and increasing brand equity and the perceived value of your products.
Just like Gymshark, the Lounge branding is extremely consistent. Every asset from their emails to their socials and website is unmistakably Lounge, with high-end photography taken in the same locations making up a huge chunk of their image, it is very clear to tell that their design team is very well aligned.
Conclusion: Final Words of Wisdom
Thank you for reading my 5 Pilar Shopify Growth Plan. I hope it was informative and left you with enough information to go out and significantly grow your Shopify store sales profitably and without any risk.
My advice to anyone is to adopt a business culture of obsession with customer and market centricity. Above all else, these are the people who bring the money to the table for you, and if you can’t deliver and continue to delight, they will simply look elsewhere.
This was always meant to be a short document to help set you on the path, but I strongly encourage you to research as much as you can elsewhere about each of the five pillars to help guide you on your journey to 7 figure revenue for your Shopify store. Each pillar could quite easily become a book in its own right!
Finally, the 5 pillar growth plan is a simple framework but one that should be seen as a process rather than a project. By this I mean each pillar should become a fundamental part of your business operation, with a dedicated focus on each that is consistently repeated and improved upon. You can always increase your RPV building a stronger brand will also help with that as it can lead to better and more expensive products being developed, which are in turn fed by your research and customer insights, which will also go on to impact you cLTV, which also helps with your brand (etc).
The 5 pillars quickly become a flywheel of sorts that picks up momentum and snowballs your business growth if each of the pillars is nurtured and well invested in with financial budgets, skilled staff, and adequate time.
Remember: If at any time you find scaling your business profitably starts to become a problem, go back to Pillar 1 & Pillar 2 to make improvements. Use Pillar 3 to learn more about how you can improve Pillar 1 & Pillar 2 if you find yourself struggling to make any more gains in these areas if the budget is available to do so.
Digital Surface helps Shopify stores grow profitably through advertising without risk. Our fully-managed 5 pillar growth plan is guaranteed to increase your Shopify store revenue in as little as 90 days.
Why You Can Trust Us: 52% MoM Growth with S2AS – our services have produced £650k in incremental revenue over 12 months & have consistently made up at least 40% of their online turnover since June 2020.
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best-in-class website experiences. By implementing this data into their welcome email series we drive a consistent $35k per month from new signups alone.
Did any of this information help to grow your business? Please pay it forward by sharing it with someone who may find it useful. It would mean the world to me.
