7 Simple Steps to Your First Million Dollar Ecom Store – WITHOUT Amazon

Now, it’s no secret Amazon is AMAZING to get a business started. 

You have fixed expenses for acquisition and high-levels of traffic.  You can quickly scale to over 100K a month on the platform.

Amazon has transformed many people’s lives for the better.  We love Amazon.

But also amazon has its issues:

Trying to get product into stores (especially when you’re deemed non-essential)
You don’t get to keep marketing to the customer (see steps 4-5 why this kills you)
Easy for people to rip off products and sales pages
If you want to sell your business, you’ll get paid more if it’s off Amazon (don’t want to work forever do you?)

These issues are driving more people into creating their own branded store.

AND, there are many reasons why doing your first 100K/month off Amazon on your own branded site will change your life (and your wallet).

With the current tailwinds, it’s easier than ever to do your first 100K/month off of Amazon.

A shift in buyer behavior

Covid has shifted more and more buyers ONLINE which is great news if you’re starting your branded store.

The good news is, companies have been slow to adapt to the online market so we are still in the grassroots stage.

Covid should further solidify the trend of people doing all of their shopping online.

With the tailwinds at your back, here’s a straight-forward 7 step process to do your first 100K off Amazon:

Step 1:  Build a retargeting funnel to convert people searching for products

This is a basic step most people miss.

People who are now searching your product website from amazon are TARGET buyers.  You are getting hundreds of dollars of free traffic.

Monetize them!

The mistake most people make is that they just build a retargeting funnel linking back to product ads.

They are leaving massive amounts of money on the table when they do this.

The ROI for these ads are typically around 150% to 300% ROAS.

Contrast that to what we can a POWER TRIANGLE retargeting funnel that is 600% to 1,000% ROAS

What is a POWER TRIANGLE Retargeting Funnel?

It does 3 things for the prospect

1.  Creates clarity on result
2.  Makes them certain they can do it
3.  Creates consistency in supporting prospect on journey

The POWER TRIANGLE retargeting funnel is simple, effective, and helps you built a client acquisition machine.

Once you get the POWER TRIANGLE retargeting funnel in place, it’s on to step 2:

Step 2 Build Functional Website

Now, this is step 1 if you don’t already have a site.

When we are talking functional websites, I want to stress 1 point:

KEEP THINGS SIMPLE AND FOCUS ON SPEED

I’ve seen instead too many campaigns that lost 50% in performance overnight….

The cause was a complex site!

Here are some points when getting your site created:

1.  Find someone in your niche/industry to model.  Don’t reinvent the wheel YET
2.  Don’t get overly creative and complex
3.  Make sure you get all your tracking pixels onsite
4.  Limit the number of APPS you use

A site costs between $2,000 upwards to $6,500 depending on the amount of customization. 

Again, focus on SIMPLICITY and SPEED. 

Make sure the site loads in under 3 seconds or you are dead in the water.

Now that you have a great site, you’re ready to some cold traffic with step 3:


Step 3:  Start basic shopping ads @ $15 – $20 a day for your best performing products.

Once you can convert shopping/PPC ads, you’re developing a machine that can SCALE.

Your goal at first is to breakeven on customer acquisition.  Meaning if you spend $1.00 you make at least $1.00 back in PROFIT.

You next goal is to take your spend to $100-$200 a day.

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Do this, and you can rapidly scale up to 100K/month in sales.

Why?

Because of step 4, which is the money maker…..

Step 4:  Build the base backend sequence

Getting good at the backend is the cheat code to business if done right.

Remember spending $1.00 and making $1.00 profit back?

With a solid backend, you can turn that $1.00 spend into $2.00+.

Our Ecom companies do over 50% of their revenue (with little spend on the backend).

The first steps to building your backend (and 25% more revenue):

1.  Create a basic abandon cart sequence. 
2.  Welcome series
3.  A subscription/ascension series

The abandon cart series is going to mix together the retargeting funnel with basic abandon cart emails.  You should see 15% more sales from these emails.

The welcome series/subscription series focuses on building a long-term relationship with your customers.  The goal is to get 10% of customers to buy monthly subscriptions and become a frequent buyer.

Do this, and you’ll dominate.

Think of it this way, if your average cart value is $100.

You make 1000 sales/month

Say product costs you $50 and you spend $30 to acquire the customer.

That’s $20 of profit per sale.

And $20,000 a month of profit. 

Now, if you can get 10% of your audience to spend $100/month ongoing, here are what your PROFIT numbers look like if you maintain 1000 sales a month

Month 1:  $20,000
Month 2:  $25,000
Month 3:  $30,000
Month 4: $35,000
Month 5: $40,000 –  PROFIT DOUBLED
Month 6: $45,000
Month 7: $50,000
Month 8: $55,000
Month 9: $60,000.
Month 10: $65,000
Month 11: $70,000
month 12: $75,000

You’ve 3.5X’d your profit WITHOUT any additional ad spend/complexities.

With those numbers if you were breaking even on spend on the frontend, your $1.00 would be $3.50 profit.

Not bad.

Now, let’s talk more about how you do this:

Step 5:  Go deeper with your customers and communicate regularly

Everyone spends their marketing dollars on acquisition. 

VERY FEW companies spend money on building long-term relationships with their customers.

Those that do, know it’s like cheating.

Here’s a quick snapshot what that looks like in the wild.

This is from a newer store closing in on 100K a month.

See that 50% of revenue is on the back-end?

This is from mastering step 4 and step 5.

So how do you go deeper with your customers?

Here are some simple things you can do:

A.  Email often –  We email 3X to 4X a week and make 15% of our store sales from these regular emails.
B.  Build educational webinars/videos/show ways to use your product.  We make another 10% of store revenue through these videos. Our long-term (most profitable) customers love these!
C.  Pick-up the phone/message them and talk with them. This is so incredibly basic, but is easy profits.

Why?

They help you understand WHY they bought the product (so you can create better marketing)
They help you understand what other problems they have (so you know what else to sell them)
They tell you any issues you’re having on site/through process (they are your best trouble shooting).

When companies start doing A, B, and C revenues shoot up and that may be enough to take them past 100K.

If not, there are 2 more steps that will get you there:

Step 6:  Technical site optimization

Here’s a couple things to know:  With ECOM, things will break.

A slow site will KILL you.

So technical optimization focuses on a fast site and website Schema.

Why do this now and not earlier?

At this point, you have enough traffic that a smaller increase in conversion rate will be noticeable.

So if your site goes from 2.0% to 2.5% conversion, you’ll see quite a bit of profit.

Why not do more optimization?

When doing larger scale optimization, you typically see 10% to 20% increase.

At 300K/month, 10% is a huge lift.  At sub 100K, money is typically spent better elsewhere.

Also, technical optimization runs around $1,500 vs. larger scale optimization can be 10K-20K/month.

Big difference.

Now that you have your ducks in a row, you should be close to 100K if not past it. 

At this point, it’s time to turn on the flood of traffic:

Step 7:  Scale across multiple marketing channels

You should have Google Shopping ads, a solid FB retargeting and possibly PPC campaigns going. 

To go to 500K+ a month, we need to add in other channels to make this happen.

In the Ecom space, here are the one ones we use the most:

Display ads (huge amount of traffic)
Youtube ads
SEO
BING

Once you are the step 7, you have a couple advantages starting more channels:

1.  You can pay for the best help because you have a great profit
2.  You have a strong backend so it’s easier to run at a loss if required
3.  One bad step won’t crush you

This puts you in a strong position because now you can attract talent WITHOUT having to do more work. 

You’re able to reap the rewards of your SYSTEM and build a business that provides freedom and profit.

Perhaps even take a few luxury tripsJ.

Hope this blog was helpful.

If you’d like to know how we partner with stores to implement this process at light speed, just click on the link below to schedule a call.