eCom Unity #7 - My 9 Biggest eCom Learnings in 2024

Deep-Dive | My 9 Biggest eCom Learnings in 2024

For my keynote at our latest eCom Unity Unplugged event in September, I was gathering my thoughts and observations from the tons of discussions with eCom founders and experts I already had this year.

Basically, those key learnings can be broken down into the following 9 statements.

More context to all of those in a video at the end of this section. 👇🏼

#1 Averages are the enemy of insight.

Averages are great for controlling, but are not great at generating insights.

Insights always lie in variances which is why we always prioritized allowing you to slice and dice your data across dimension.

An example - if your average CLV is $130 but only 30% if your customers buy a second time.

That means that the CLV of customers who buy a second time is $328 (628% higher than those who buy once assuming a contribution margin of $45 in the first order).

That’s a massive gap which shows that you don’t just have to rely on email marketing for retention.

#2 Customer Activation is the biggest retention opportunity.

Activation ensure that your customers use your product frequently and in the right way.

On average only 20-25% of customers buy a second time which is poor (the best brands have >50%).

This can only have three reasons:

1. Your product is bad

2. The customers bought the product for the wrong reasons/with the wrong expectation

3. You are not activating your customers

#3 Creative diversity is the key to paid social performance at scale.

Most ad librarys look the same. But the reality is that different people, react best to different types of content, hooks and benefits.

Thus, the secret to great performance at scale is creative diversity.

#4 You can tell a good brand from their ad naming conventions.

Naming conventions mean having an a) clear and b) comprehensive structure in how you name your ads.

While there is no causation, there is a correlation. Why? Because brands with a good naming prioritize generating (macro) learnings.

Here’s my UTM Naming Convention Guide if you want to dive deep: https://www.getklar.com/blog/utm-naming-ecommerce

#5 Post Purchase Surveys are criminally underutilized.

Most brands don’t use Post Purchase Survey (PPS)

And those that do, usually only use it for attribution.

But there is so much customer knowledge that can be extracted from here (with little selection bias) that can inform your entire marketing and product strategy.

#6 Customer surveys are mostly a waste of time.

Most brands send customer surveys twice a year and create some PDF based on the results.

Everyone looks at them once and nothing really happens with it.

This is another plus of PPS, you are not only generating more and faster feedback, but can also understand which answers are leading to higher lifetime value in @Klar which can inform your entire strategy(see point 1 and 4)

#7 eCom Brands are usually not great with data.

If you want to start working more with data in your company, you have to focus on education as most people have little experience in how to unlock insights from data.

This is something we underestimated and a strong focus for us in the future.

#8 The key benefit of attribution is not the data.

Some of our customers had huge unlocks by shifting budgets based on our attribution data (we’re talking customer acquistions costs going down >30% in less than 4 weeks.

Yet, I believe that long-term, the biggest benefit of an attribution models is that you can stop arguing and start executing.

The key for that is that everybody understand the underlying model so that they can build trust in it which is something we have been doing from day 1.

#9 The best eCom founders take big swings.

As eCom marketers we are obsessed with testing things which makes total sense.

But we test way to small. More often than not

Small Changes = Small Results

Big Changes = Big Results

The most successful brands I speak to have strong convictions and don’t shy away to make drastic changes (even to something that is working).

More context on this in the video: 👇🏼

Upcoming Events | Online Workshops on BFCM Success

I’m happy to host two online eCom Unity workshops this and next week to tweak your BFCM preparation and outcome.

With Simon and Samu, I’ll bring in proven experts in their fields to share actionable insights you can implement straight away.

• TODAY: Wed, 30 Oct (🇩🇪): Google Ads & Intra Day Bidding für maximalen Q4-Erfolg mit Simon Borg von Touchpoint
  Signup here.

• Wed, 06 Nov (🇬🇧): 15 A/B Tests & Optimizations for BFCM + live Q&A with Samuel Hess from DRIP
  Signup here.

You can find more details and past workshop recordings here: https://getklar.com/workshops

If you can’t make it on those dates don’t worry. If you’ve signed up you’ll receive a recording of the sessions afterward.

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses. If you missed any past issues, you can catch up on all of them here.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past and with Klar, I work with over 700 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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