Episode 172: 3 Golden Rules for E-Commerce Brands
If you own an e-commerce store or have just launched a product, understanding these three essential truths can make all the difference between staying stagnant and achieving rapid growth. Whether you're just starting out or scaling quickly, these actionable insights from our expert guest will help you drive more sales and grow your business.
Here’s Must-Know Truths to Boost Sales and Scale Your E-Commerce Store
Product pages are your sales team—optimize them to convert browsers into buyers.
Utilize email marketing to nurture leads and upsell existing customers.
Invest in retargeting ads to re-engage visitors who didn’t convert.
Use tools like Google Ads and Facebook Pixel to track campaign performance and ROI.
A/B test headlines, CTAs, and layouts to find what resonates best with your audience.
Unlock more sales by truly understanding your target audience! Dive deeper than demographics—address their pain points, fulfill their desires, and align with their buying behaviors. Build a strong, trustworthy brand that turns shoppers into loyal advocates. Start implementing these strategies today—small, consistent steps can drive massive results for your e-commerce success! 🚀
Product Businesses! Download my free HOW TO GET INTO A GIFT GUIDE/PRODUCT ROUND UP roadmap for free HERE to get more sales and traffic to your site this season.
If you want to land your first feature for free without any connections, I want to invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought-after industry expert. Register now at www.gloriachoupr.com/masterclass.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
Follow Susan Bradley on her socials:
Ecommerce Roadmap Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ph/podcast/the-ecommerce-roadmap/id1518194256
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/socialsalesgirls/
Website: https://thesocialsalesgirls.com/
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: Marketing and PR super accessible for the everyday small business underdog. Today we have Susan Bradley. She is an e-commerce genius. Okay. She is a host of Ecommerce Roadmap podcast, and she's also the founder of social sales girl. And I was just on her podcast, having a delightful conversation. Today we're going to be talking about the loss, the irrefutable things about e-commerce as she has learned from helping so many e-commerce founders. So welcome to the show, Susan.
00:00:28 Susan: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
00:00:30 Gloria: So I love this whole concept of, you been able to see from a 20 foot thousand view, right? Because you've helped so many founders. And I want to get into the laws that people don't really think about, but are always true. So let's start with the first one. What is something that people need to know in e-commerce that maybe they haven't thought of, but you know is just absolutely for a fact?
00:00:53 Susan: Yes, absolutely for a fact. We've seen it time and time again. And what most of our owners don't know, and this knowing this is really gonna help them, help their mental health, is that once you have proof of concept for your product, success with e-commerce is a numbers game. And what I mean by proof of concept is really if someone has purchased your product that isn't your mom or your sister or your friend, and they've purchased your product for the price that you're asking, and they've purchased it maybe at a craft fair or they've purchased it on a marketplace like Etsy or maybe even a Facebook group even, if you've been on a marketplace.
00:01:33 Susan: If they have done that, you have proof of concept. That means that somebody wants your product at the price you're asking and it is saleable. And so once you have that, you don't have to worry that your product is priced wrong or it's the wrong color or nobody wants it. You know you have proof of concept. And so now you need to focus on what's really important with e-commerce, which is numbers. It's a numbers game.
00:01:59 Gloria: That way we don't have to think it's a personal stab at my heart. People don't know my stuff.
00:02:05 Susan: No, people don't like your stuff. And the other thing I think is that you're, you can stop worrying that your website isn't right. That you need to go change the color of your buttons or you need to reorganize it or you need to come screaming into a Facebook group and post it and tell people you opened three weeks ago, but you don't have any sales. Can they go critique your website? You don't need to do any of those things.
00:02:28 Susan: What you really need to understand is that if you are not making sales and you aren't reaching your goals, it's almost always a visibility and a traffic problem.
And I like to think about it, explain it to our members that are struggling with this, because our first instinct is always to tweak our website when we're not getting the sales we want. And really what they have to imagine is that their website is a store at the busiest mall, the biggest busiest mall in the world, but it is down at the end of a hallway that's maybe 300 feet long, and the lights are off down there.
00:03:05 Susan: And that's why they're not reaching their goals because they really nobody is seeing them. They're not seeing enough. And I will see people that will come in and say, "Hey, I'm just not making any sales. I've had, you know, I get about 15 people to my website a day." And what they don't know is that that's in e-commerce, that's nothing. If you had a brick and mortar store and you had 15 people walk in, you could count on some sales from that.
00:03:32 Susan: But in e-commerce, given our conversion rates, you really need a lot more than that. The average conversion rate is one to 2% for e-commerce store owners. So just to get a sale a day, to regularly get a sale every single day, you really need about 3000 web visitors every month, just to have enough eyeballs on your product to get one sale a day. Nobody really talks about that, but that's the number one reason people aren't getting the sales they want.
00:04:02 Gloria: It's just a volumes game, right? I think a lot of times we try to meet everyone where they are, well, maybe I need to give more discounts or I need it and you're saying, that's not true. It's not about lowering your prices.
00:04:13 Susan: Oh, no, it's not. It's not at all about lowering your prices. It'sreally about putting your products. Your number one job as an e-commerce store owner is to get your products in front of the right people. And we forget that because it's, we're too close to it. And we're so personal. And we don't understand because it's very different than being on Etsy where they are driving thousands of pairs of eyeballs to that site every day, they're doing that for you. So you don't even notice.
00:04:43 Susan: Or if you're at a craft fair and it's full, there are a lot of people walking by your booth every day. They are driving the traffic for you. And so really, I mean, it's part of the learning process. If you're setting up your own e-commerce store, part of your work, and the very important part of your work is getting those eyeballs. You need to drive your own traffic.
00:05:07 Susan: it's a little bit difficult at the beginning. But the good news is once you figure it out, you have so much more control. you can actually control your sales. you need more sales. You just get more traffic.
00:05:23 Gloria: I love that. And I love what you said about visibility because as a PR gal, to me, there's no better way than getting in front of people with a gift guide. So how do people get more traffic? I mean, there's obviously ads, PR, social media. what have you found works, especially at the early stages where maybe you don't have a gazillion dollars for ads?
00:05:42 Susan: Well, I think the one thing, yes, for sure, we've worked with a lot of people who don't have a gazillion dollars for ads. One of the things that we recommend, part of what we have in one of our programs, it's called the 30-day audience builder. And so we have people track their audience and you know we we feel like you need to get in front of 100,000 to 300,000. Visible to that many people a month in order to get the traffic that you need to your site.
00:06:09 Susan: And really what I would love your audience to understand is that even on social media and they all almost everyone puts a lot of time and effort into social media and they're very worried about if people unfollow them or how many followers they have, but really, again, it is a volume. Social media is a volume play.
00:06:29 Susan: And so one of the things we teach people is how to get big reach on social media. Basically, we have them post several times a day, but it doesn't have to be,, perfectly curated. And we have them repeat those posts. We show them how to tell which posts are getting the highest reach, getting the most eyeballs and we show them how to recycle and reuse those posts every month.
00:06:57 Susan: And so it's not unusual for people who were getting, maybe they had visibility of 4,000, like reach of 4,000 people every month to really build an audience that is 100,000 or more that actually sees their products every single month. And so that's organic. You don't have to spend a lot of money for that.
00:07:16 Susan: The other thing we do, which is really powerful, and we work on that with our students, is we have them create videos for their brand. And they don't have to be professional. In fact, often the behind the you know scenes, the little rough videos actually work better. And we teach them how to make 30 to 60 second videos that really attract their perfect people, get the people who are most likely to buy to stop the scroll.
00:07:45 Susan: Watch the video, and we show them how to build audiences of people who have watched that video so that they can then go ahead and retarget them. Andthose videos are great organically, they're also really good for a cheap, like $3 a day ad. You can get a lot of video views and build a really big audience, with a brand video. Every, single store owner should have a brand video.
00:08:10 Gloria: Love it. And it's just take our eyeballs. Okay, what's the second irrefutable law?
00:08:15 Susan: What's the second irrefutable law? I think that what you need to know is whether you need to know the formula for sales., whether you are a store owner who's just trying to get a sale a day or you're a store owner who's trying to get a hundred sales a day. Generally the framework for that is the same, that the formula for sales is your traffic times your conversion rate which is going to give you the number of orders you get every month. And that times your average order value is going to give you your sales.
00:08:50 Susan: And so when you're setting your sales goal, so many people just set an arbitrary sales goal, they're like, oh, okay, I did a hundred thousand this year. So next year I'm going to do 150,000 because I'm on a roll and I have momentum. And then they never sit down and do the math to actually figure out what is it going to take me to get $50,000 more in sales.
00:09:12 Susan: How much more traffic do I have to bring to my site in order to get those sales? Or how much more in my average order value do I have to uh create? Do I have to move my average order value from 50 to $75? What do I have to do to reach that goal? And so what I want every store owner to realize is figure out what you want to happen and then break it down into a math problem and say to yourself, hey, number one, can I afford that much traffic?
00:09:44 Susan: And number two, is it possible even? Is it even possible for me to do that? Have I stretched too far? And I think people don't do that. They just kind of set an arbitrary goal. And so often they're deflated because they didn't do the math to figure it out. But the math is the same. You need 3,000 web visitors to get a sale aday. Well, I think you need 10,000 web visitors to get a hundred sales a month. That's what you need. And so based on whatever your conversion rate is, you have everything you need to figure it out.
00:10:22 Gloria: Yeah. And then it takes an emotion away from it because--
00:10:25 Susan: Exactly. Yeah. You stop feeling like such a loser all the time because you're like, oh, okay, so I didn't make my goal. I know why, cause I didn't have enough traffic. So now I know what to do. And for a lot... often I see when I look at our members and certainly my experience with my own websites is,, it often costs 10, 10 to 15 cents to get a web visitor with an ad. And so you can generate a lot organically, but pretty much everybody has to pay for some traffic.
00:10:58 Gloria: For some, yeah. PR definitely helps with that, but yeah, definitely--
00:11:01 Susan: Absolutely. Yeah.
For sure. And can we just say if you do it through PR, you're likely going to get better quality, higher converting traffic than you will if you just throw an ad out on Meta.
00:11:13 Gloria: Yeah. And you can actually use the PR as an ad, like as seen in.
00:11:16 Susan: Absolutely. Yeah. Lots of times people will come into our um into our community, our paid community and say, "Hey, I just got featured in something. What should I do next?" And so they know it's exciting, but they also want to know what they should do next and what they should do next is get that person back to their website again.
00:11:40 Gloria: That brings us to number three, which is what you talked about. Third golden rule.
00:11:45 Susan: So the third rule I would say that people don't know because nobody talks about it is that when somebody comes to your website, the first time it's really not common that they would make a purchase on that first visit. They really don't, There's a report you can build in Google Analytics that will show you what the conversion rate is for first time visitors. And you can compare that in that report to what the conversion rate is for people who have made multiple visits within a short time period.
00:12:18 Susan: And so frequency and recency is a huge big deal in e-commerce. And so you're going to spend some time, like your first goal, if you're just starting out, is to get 3,000 web visitors to your website. But your second goal is not to get 5,000 web visitors. Your second goal is really now to focus hard on those 3,000 people you got and really work hard to get them back to your site for a second or a third or a fourth visit.
00:12:44 Susan: And when you do that, you'll see that those returning visitors, those people who have come back to your site multiple times in a short time period, they are anywhere from two to five times more likely to make a purchase than a first time visitor. And so don't blow out your brains, trying to get all those people to your site and then they drift off and you never hear from them again or see them again.
00:13:09 Susan: Really take your time and be intentional and the best way to get people back to your site that is basically free is by email marketing. And so before you really spend a lot of time and money, setting up a traffic, like getting more traffic to your site, you really need a way to collect email addresses on your site. And so even though we all love to hate them, you really need a pop-up on your site that offers somebody something in exchange for an email.
00:13:39 Susan: And so don't just say, sign up for our newsletter, because that ship sailed a long time ago. Nobody wants your newsletter. But there are things you can do. Especially if there are higher-end products, and you'll see this in some of the
the big guys, and offer to enter people in a giveaway for a gift card or you can offer people 10% off to spend today on their first purchase. And then you can put those people in an automation that maybe lasts for seven or eight days.
00:14:10 Susan: And the whole goal with that email automation is to get them back to your site multiple times so that they convert. And I know we teach this inside of our program. And I know that if you can get an email that way that for many store owners, that email address is really worth, maybe eight or $10 to you because of the higher conversion rate.
00:14:33 Gloria: Oh, 100%. I mean, first party data, especially with privacy laws now in order to get that one person, that transference of trust is so much higher than maybe 10 or 20 or 30 on Instagram of person who might never buy from you. So I love what you said about leveraging, first party data.
00:14:50 Gloria: Getting more traffic, building that trust. It's not about, 5,000 people, but getting people to visit you so that you have multiple touch points. And let's be honest, people are oversold too. There's market saturation. So the more times they can get familiar with you through PR placements, through, trust, whatever that is through good marketing, through good ads. That's going to be good. So I love what you said.
00:15:12 Gloria: It affirms a lot of what I do as well. And obviously email marketing is so key to any industry, it doesn't matter if you make a physical product or not, but email marketing for us, it's also very important.
00:15:21 Susan: Huge, yeah. Most of our clients, we tell them to aim for a bare minimum of 30% of revenue from last click on an email. Because if you don't, it is so expensive to acquire customers only through ads, that I think that most people would acquire customers until they're bankrupt. But there's a better, a much better way. And it might not be as fast, but it creates a really profitable long-term business that you can scale. Because you know-
00:15:56 Gloria: Exactly, you don't wanna keep feeding the beast.
00:15:58 Susan: Right, yeah. if you have an email list of a thousand people and you run a promotion and say that, that promotion generates $5,000 in sales. Think about what happens when you build that email list to 5,000 people or 10,000 people. It scales and you don't have to change anything that you're doing and it basically costs you the same, other than might pay a little bit more to run your email service provider, but it's really scalable and it's as organic as people like us can get.
00:16:32 Gloria: Totally. These are so good. The time we're recording this, it's a new year and I think a lot of times... we're so overwhelmed with all these things on our to-do list. I think what you gave us is some really good reframe. Sometimes we just need a good reframe to be like, yes, it's not you. It's just a different way to think about it. So you've given that. How can people find you and get into your world?
00:16:51 Susan: Well, they can certainly listen to my podcast, the Ecommerce Roadmap. I try and make sure that everybody has one actionable thing, at least when they listen. Not that you should action everything you hear. But I I try to make sure that there's something they can walk away with and apply to their store. So I would follow me there. We also have a a free mini course that I'll give you the link for. It's called Conversion School.
00:17:15 Susan: What I love about this is it teaches people who are e-commerce store owners what's normal so they can see because everybody thinks they're failing. So you'll see what's normal, what normal stats look like. And we'll show you how to actually grow your conversion without spending a fortune on ads. So it's four short lessons, takes maybe an hour to watch it. And it's really cool. There is a little conversion calculator for you to use. So you can take your data, punch it into the calculator, and then you can start applying some of your goals like what would it look like if I was going to sell 5,000 this month?
00:17:52 Susan: And it'll spit out the traffic and using your data, so you'll know exactly where you stand. It's really great. So I'll give you the link to that Gloria, and you can maybe put it in the show notes for them.
00:18:02 Gloria: For sure.
00:18:03 Susan: Yeah, completely free.
00:18:04 Gloria: Thank you so much Susan, you've given us a lot to think about. And remember, it's hard, right? eCommerce is hard. But there, obviously, if you have a nice reframe for it, and you know what action steps to take and successes is absolutely possible. Thank you for giving us that cheer today.
00:18:18 Susan: Oh, thank you. And you know what? It's hard at the beginning, but it does get easier. Gosh, no, there's never been a better time to make a living selling physical products. I mean, so many of our members are location independent because they're using 3PL and they've got remote teams. It's way different than having a brick and mortar store now.
00:18:41 Gloria: Yeah, totally. Thank you so much.
00:18:43 Susan: Well, thanks for having me. It was fun.
00:18:47 Gloria: Hey, that was nice. I was thinking, because we're so aligned, it would be cool to do like a freebie in each other's programs.
00:18:56 Susan: Sure.
00:18:57 Gloria: So I don't know what would help them.
00:18:58 Gloria: Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connections? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert. Now, if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at GloriaChouPR.com/Masterclass. That's GloriaChou, C-H-O-U-P-R.com/Masterclass. So you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free. So get in there and let's get you featured.