Is Your Business Growing As Fast As It Could Be?
Attention Direct-to-Consumer Brands:
I see it all the time: big businesses, growing fast, and yet missing out on easy profits.
Usually, it’s the business owners who have ridden one hit product or one marketing channel or one hot market to a nice seven- to eight-figure online business.
Typically, this is cause for celebration, but any excitement is short-lived. Like all true entrepreneurs, these business owners soon want more. They look at their business and industry, and they know they are leaving money on the table.
That kills them.
So they read marketing blogs and go to e-commerce conferences and take copious notes on what they should be doing.
But the more information they consume, the more they realize that their operation has shortcomings. Maybe it is weak on CRM or SEO or SEM or lead generation–or maybe all of the above.
There’s untapped opportunity. This is direct-to-consumer, after all, a great model with healthy margins. They could be generating more revenue and profits. They aren’t.
This is when they get stuck.
Stuck because they don’t know which opportunity to go after first.
Stuck because they are too busy working in the business that they can’t carve out the time to work on the business.
The campaigns alone have generated $44,ooo incremental revenue since we created them.
Navigating the changing landscape of e-commerce had become too daunting for me. I wanted to focus on product. I didn’t have the time or interest to be constantly optimizing marketing. Drew ended up being a great partner in my efforts. He identified email as a key growth driver for the business and suggested a handful of automated campaigns we should develop to nurture our best customers. Once we built them out, they pumped out positive ROI like clockwork. The campaigns alone have generated $44,ooo incremental revenue since we created them.
Getting Unstuck: The Growth Audit
If any of this sounds familiar to you, I designed a solution to get you unstuck and ramping up profits.
I call it the Growth Audit.
It is a business audit and roadmap that gives owners like you the precise strategy and feedback you need–when you need it–to scale your businesses.
You see, it’s a BIG mistake to try to optimize all aspects of your business at once. You simply don’t have the resources or time to redo a website, improve SEO, launch email campaigns, and push on paid ad spend at the same time.
The magic is that you don’t have to do everything at once. Fifty years of catalog marketing plus another 15 of e-commerce marketing has shown us that the 80/20 rule exists in all aspects of a digital business.
Twenty percent of your customers drive 80 percent of your business.
Twenty percent of your website’s pages drive 80 percent of the page views. And only a small portion of your marketing campaigns, funnels and spend actually drive significant growth at your business.
Check out this Google Analytics screenshot from an 8-figure client of mine.
One percent of their traffic drives 43% percent of the revenue:
This is both amazingly powerful and scary information.
Powerful because every business has “small hinges that swing big doors”–only a few things that it needs to focus on at any one time to trigger epic growth.
Scary because if you ignore these few things, your business will stagnate. Or grow, but grow unprofitably.
The quickest way for you to achieve significant, revenue-doubling, hockey-stick growth and profits is to identify these few things and ignore the rest.
That is what my team and I do for you in a Growth Audit.
Drew is famous for building data-centric e-commerce before it was a thing
Andrew Warner (host): “Do you have a sales funnel, or is it just someone comes in and either orders or they leave?
Morgan: We do. So that was a big shift in thinking. One of the things I wanted to learn to see if we could really control, was turning Mixed Made into a predictable business. For most of last year, it was online direct sales. [Then] I was introduced to the concept of segmentation by Drew Sanocki.
Basically, it’s pretty simple, but the idea is that you should think about your customers and think about and treat your customers differently depending on where they come from and what stage they’re at.
Warner: Interesting. I see. Who is it that taught you, Drew who?
Morgan: Sanocki.
Warner: Sanocki.
Morgan: I think Drew is famous for building data-centric e-commerce before it was a thing.
Who Is This Guy?
Once upon a time, I was in your shoes. Fifteen years ago, I started DesignPublic.com–an online modern design retailer.
I grew it to a seven-figure business within 18 months.
I sold it to a private equity group after eight profitable years.
I then became an operational partner at a private equity firm. In that capacity, I help to buy and grow online businesses.
I’ve used the same 80/20 approach that I mentioned above at brand after brand after brand.
I used it at Avenue (50 US stores) to increase customer lifetime value and at Old Time Pottery ($200+mn top line) to increase their subscriber list 20% in one week.
I used it at Fanprint to identify one single marketing approach that took them from $0 – $10mn in 1.5 years.
And I used my approach at Karmaloop. As CMO, I helped to turn that eight-figure, money-losing, bankrupt company cash-flow positive in under ten months.
The approach works. At the end of the day, it’s basic math mixed in with a fair amount of e-commerce “been-there, seen-that, done-that” know-how.
(Yes, I have gray hair, and yes I’ve been in e-commerce since 2000.)
For big engagements, I bring a complete marketing team that includes a data analyst, a project manager, an ad buyer, an email marketer, copywriters, and so on.
We not only make recommendations, we implement them. That’s why private equity firms and big retailers pay us five-figure monthly retainers plus equity for typical engagements.
We can distil most of our e-commerce consulting work into a custom Audit that costs a fraction of what our retainer engagements costs and only takes a couple weeks from start to completion.
What Is In A Growth Audit?
A veteran plan to grow your business
The Growth Audit is a business audit and roadmap.
The goal of the Audit is threefold:
We Approach Each Audit As Follows:
We get access to your web analytics. We use this to identify what 80/20 customers, products, and marketing channels are driving your business.
That's where we want to focus going forward.
Data analysis reveals which channels are growing this business
We get access to your email service provider. Here we focus on what you are already doing to nurture your customer asset. (If the answer is "nothing" then that's great news-big opportunity.)
We get access to your paid advertising accounts. We use these to figure out if you have been targeting the right customers, pushing the right merchandise, or neglecting high-potential acquisition funnels.
Visual depiction of which acquisition funnels will lead to growth
We collect and process years of transactional data. We do real big-data segmentation of your customer asset to identity high lifetime value segments and purchase behavior. We use this information to inform incredibly effective retention campaigns.
We develop step-by-step playbooks (with screenshots) to show you how to implement the changes that we recommend.
Advanced transactional data analysis can reveal common purchase paths that we can use to develop high-LTV email campaigns
We send you our findings in a premium report. We provide 6 weeks of email-based support.
Our final deliverable includes a premium report, the playbooks, email templates, and any supporting materials. You can implement the recommendations yourself, work on implementation with outside agencies of your choosing, or - if we think there is a fit-work with our team.
Highest recommendation
I was worried about having this be yet another info product that I don't use. But Drew's Conversion Playbook let us know where to invest our limited resources and where we would see an ROI. It allowed me to return to my strengths and grow the business. I give it my highest recommendation and full backing.
The Best Way To Grow Your Business
I believe the Growth Audit represents the best possible way to approach growing your business, especially considering the alternatives:
In short, the Audit is a great option. It contains the knowledge, the feedback, and the instructions that together accelerate your learning and growth.
What kind of ROI can you expect? 10-20% lift is not uncommon almost as soon as you roll out our recommendations, then this should compound going forward.
Run a $10m business? That equates to an extra $1m in a short amount of time. That $1m offsets the price of this investment many times over.
20% Lift
When I signed up I was worried about wasted time. Last thing I needed was more advice that I couldn’t carve out time to implement. But Drew’s action plans actually reduced the time required. As of now it is about 20% lift in conversions and revenue. We are working on the remainder of the Playbook, and hopefully can pass 40%.
Who Is This Program For?
Here’s the rub: this program isn’t for everybody.
We can only make this a success by working with certain types of businesses.
Make sense?
PS: The Growth Audit works. I have used it over 15 years of growing e-commerce businesses. If you are still on the fence, email me — I will tell you if you are a good fit.
And remember: it’s no risk. We only take on clients we think we can help. And if our recommendations don’t get you a positive ROI on your payment in a short amount of time we will give you your investment back.
The campaigns alone have generated $44,ooo incremental revenue since we created them.
Navigating the changing landscape of e-commerce had become too daunting for me. I wanted to focus on product. I didn’t have the time or interest to be constantly optimizing marketing. Drew ended up being a great partner in my efforts. He identified email as a key growth driver for the business and suggested a handful of automated campaigns we should develop to nurture our best customers. Once we built them out, they pumped out positive ROI like clockwork. The campaigns alone have generated $44,ooo incremental revenue since we created them.
FAQs
Is the Audit for me?
I have yet to see a digital business that didn’t have 80/20 in full effect across customers, marketing channels, webpages, etc. But the customer analysis approach that we use in the audit works only if you have customers. It works even better if you have repeat customers, or the potential for repeat customers. So right there, that usually means that you need to have been in business for at least six months and be doing at least six-figures in revenue.
B2C, B2B, or SAAS? Doesn’t really matter; our approach works for all because it’s rooted in the principles of database marketing.
What’s included in each Growth Audit?
This is an overview of the areas we typically assess in each Growth Audit. Although we consider everything here, if the items do not apply to your particular business we will not report on them. The Audit is all about identifying the 2-3 things you should focus on; it is not a comprehensive site audit.
I have no time to implement this stuff!
I hear you. That’s why we couple each Audit with step-by-step implementation instructions that you could hand off to a team member to get started. It’s why we make ourselves available for 6 weeks to help with any follow-on questions.
No spare team members? We make introductions to agencies that can do exactly what we am recommending a-la-carte.
The alternative that I see way too many businesses do is just toss money at this problem, hiring an “all-in-one” marketing agency or consultant to come in and “do marketing”. This is expensive! A less risky option is to run an audit like this first, find out what 2-3 levers you need to pull, and only focus there.
You will experience easier implementation with less on your plate, and the total marketing cost will be lower.
What’s the difference between Audits?
The Platinum Audit includes all the analysis of the Gold Audit. It also includes a 1-on-1 onboarding Skype call with Drew to discuss your history, goals, and unique challenges or considerations. And then at the end we schedule a follow-on call to answer any questions about our findings. It’s essentially a private equity-style diligence engagement with personal coaching from me.
What’s included in our implementation service?
Everything but the creative.
We go into your email software and build out automated email flows for your core customer segments. These will depend on the insights we get from the Audit, but usually include a Welcome Sequence, Retention Sequence, VIP Sequence, Bounceback Sequence, etc.
We configure these based on *your* customer behavior, so they are unique to your business. After building and targeting the flows, we move on and develop draft emails for each sequence. Here we specify what we believe should go in an email (i.e., “offer a 10% off limited discount on Product X in this email”) but we do not design the emails, add imagery, etc. We find that leaving this out greatly decreases the cost.
What if you can’t find any way to grow my business?
I think we do a good job of qualifying who we work with before we get started. But if for some reason we crack open your web analytics and drop our collective coffees because you are a hopeless case, doomed forever to stay at your current level . . . then we’ll just shoot you an email, refund your money, and wish you luck.
We want you to be thrilled with your Audit, not pissed off that we spent two weeks to tell you nothing you didn’t already know!
Let’s take a risk-free stab at growing your revenue by 20% over the next six months: