588: (Solo) The #1 ROI Move You’re Probably Not Using

0:01Hey founder fam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending OmniSend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OmniSend customers make$68 for every$1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50 % off your first three months with the code founder50.

0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Hey guys, Nathan here. Welcome back to another Founder to Founder Solo episode. These are short practical lessons where I share all the awesome things that I've learned from building founder the past 10 plus years and interviewing and learning and hanging out, networking from some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world. And today I want to talk about one of the most overlooked ways to grow your e-commerce store, increase your sales, and it's probably not what you think.

1:16Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:30I see a lot of founders and students and people in our community, they say, hey, look, I've got my store, I'm getting sales, but I need more traffic. Facebook ads, Instagram, content creation, TikTok, influencers, affiliates, you know, you name it, ads, all that stuff. But you know what I've seen over and over again? sometimes to double you or triple your business you can actually do it with the same amount of traffic you're already getting and so recently as she came to us she had multiple six-figure brands she was running paid ads getting traffic but she still wanted to increase the revenue from her store and so the first instinct is like let's spend more on ads but here's the thing when i looked at her store she actually didn't have a traffic problem she had a conversion problem because I could see that her store wasn't converting nowhere near as high as it should have.

2:23And like from a benchmark perspective, it obviously depends on the price point. But if your store is only converting at like one and a half percent and you're selling a product that's sub$100, you should be able to get a higher conversion rate. So it wasn't just that as well. I looked at her AOV and I'm like, oh, and what I'm about to share with you is a really cool thing. So what we did was we introduced a concept, what we call the second sale. And what happens after the first sale is you can turn that moment into like 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 % more revenue without even increasing your traffic or ad spend.

3:03And then if you can increase your conversion rate by another half a percent, then you can double your business. And it's a really, really, really, really, really crazy strategy. So first and foremost, we focused on the conversion rate and then we focused on the second sales strategy, right? So here's what most people miss. Your customer is never more ready to buy than right after they've purchased. And so this is where Amazon have made billions and billions and billions of dollars. And it's this little concept called post-purchase one-click upsells, right? So many companies do this, right? right McDonald's do this would you like fries with that and so that post-purchase window is such a prime time to offer an order bump a bundle or an optional upgrade and the best brands are doing this and they're using it to scale quickly right so they're increasing their AOV by 10 20 30 40 you can even increase by 50 it is crazy what you can do there's a tool that we really like if you have an e-commerce brand and that's called AfterSell.

4:12So they make this super easy. One-click upsells, optimized thank you pages, limited time offers after your checkout or even on your checkout page. And one of our students, just like as I shared, like she implemented just one of these and she saw a 10 % lift, right? And we're still optimizing, still optimizing, right? So it's really, really crazy what you can do when you use a little tool like this. And as I shared, this is what Amazon does. Like look at your own purchasing behavior. When you go on Amazon and you purchase something, they're like, oh, would you like this? Or, you know, people regularly purchased these other things with your first purchase.

4:51The reason this works and it's such a powerful strategy is if you've already paid to acquire a customer, they already trust you. They're still in buying mode and people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. So you don't have to compete for somebody's attention when you already have it. And every single business, there's a small percentage of customers that will always spend more with you. Not all your customers, but a small percentage. Now that could be 20%, that could be 30%, that could be 40%, it could be 5%. But you're leaving money on the table. So when you're looking at your business and you're looking to increase your revenue for your e-commerce store, instead of pushing harder on traffic, please look at your conversion rate.

5:31But also look at increasing your average order value, AOV, and customer lifetime value from people already in your ecosystem. And this is what smart founders do, right? To grow a business, you got three dials, right? An online business. It's traffic, conversion rate, and AOV. You got to tweak those dials. So if you're seeing traffic, but you're not getting the amount of sales that you're looking for, please ask yourself, do you have post-purchase offers in place? Are you using your thank you page to increase value? Are you segmenting your customers and even following up with smart offers? This is how you increase your customer lifetime value.

6:07You don't need to rebuild your store. You don't need to add more traffic. Just start with one post-purchase test and see if you can measure that lift. Most of you guys, right, are leaving thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, depending on the scale of your store, on the table. And the amount of founders that we see don't implement this stuff is crazy. So if you want to grow without spending more, this is where you start, right? look at your conversion strategy, not just your traffic strategy. So guys, if you're looking for an awesome post-purchase tool, one that we personally use is Aftersell, we'll add a link in the show notes.

6:43We've got a special offer from them. Of course, it's affiliate link. We will get a commission, but I didn't do this podcast just to pitch some product. I did it because it is something that I'm seeing so often that not enough founders are doing. And if you want more step-by-step help growing your brand we do have an incredible founder e-commerce coaching program just go to founder.com and fill in an application we can't work with everyone but if you go to our website apply to our coaching you'll be able to speak to someone on our team and see if it's a fit but thank you again for tuning in and i'll see you on the next one