Five Exponential Growth Ideas

The purpose of this post is to outline several great methods for growing your eCommerce Store (and I am sure you can apply some of these to a service based or brick and mortar business if you tried).

Some of these methods are not very common, but are effective nonetheless. I have done my best to explain them all in writing, but if you have any questions, send me a message on Twitter at @mattlarsenecom.

The Methods

• Partner Giveaways

• Monthly Contests

• Selling Leads

• Referral Coupons

• Charity Events

1. Partner Giveaways

One of the most obvious ways to grow (that is rarely done) is to partner with other brands that are similar to yours and cross promote each other.

Their customers will find out about you. Your customers will find out about them. Since you both sell similar products (but not the same type of products), there is a reasonable chance that your customers will need/want their product and vice versa.

You giveaway a few hundred dollars of your product(s) and they give a few hundred dollars of their product(s) and you create a valuable offer that people will want to get (so they sign up for the contest).

This is one of the best ways to grow and to make a lot of money, because this is free to do.

You have both already spend thousands (or millions) of dollars to acquire all of your customers. That cost has already been paid. Why would you work twice as hard and spend twice as much money to acquire even more?

You have their customers. They have yours. Work together.

The number one thing that will get in the way of this working is pride and ego and unfortunately, pride and ego win the majority of the time.

The way that you carry this out also matters in my opinion.

You may have seen (or done at some point) a version of this where the brand says "comment on this post and tag five friends" in order to win X on Instagram.

This is very half-assed and is unlikely to work.

Instead of doing that, try this:

Both brands should create a page on their website where people have to sign up by email in order to enter. As part of this form, make a note that by submitting this form, they are consenting to receive email marketing from both brands. Make a checkbox that they have to click in order to submit (for legal reasons), and then sync each form to both of your lists.

Make a special email flow that will begin to nurture the people that join your list and find out about you from your partner company.

I would recommend giving them a bunch of free value in the form of ideas, education, digital downloads, etc., at the start so you can build a little bit of rapport and trust so they don't immediately unsubscribe from your mailing list.

If each brand has 50,000 customers, it is not unusual for each company to get 1,000 - 5,000 brand new customers (at zero cost) by running one of these giveaways.

Follow these guidelines when promoting the contest:

• Tell them what they have to do to enter (URL + form)

• Hype up the other company really hard (they should be a good company or else you shouldn't partner with them)

• Make it clear that you are partners and are in a long-term relationship with each other.

You want to do this because you will get a far higher number of customers from your partner brand that become your customer and vice versa, and that is the goal here.

The moral of the story is if you can do 12 - 24 of these contests per year and are a decent-sized company, you could quite literally get 20,000+ customers over the course of a year, with absolutely zero ad spend or customer acquisition cost (other than the few hundred bucks for the giveaway).

2. Monthly Contests

Another great way to grow your brand is by doing monthly contests.

These are so strong because they can improve all of your most important metrics: CPA, AOV, LTV.

These contests may sound similar to the Partner Giveaways but they are not the same thing and how you execute these is quite a bit different.

Here is what you should do:

• Pick a prize to give away that is about $2,000 value. That is just a guideline, although it is a nice balance between being high enough that people are motivated to enter, and being low enough that it doesn't break the bank.

• Pick your contest dates. You should do this every month if you can, but you can start with once per quarter.

• Promote the contest at least once a week via social media, email and have a banner/announcement bar on your website.

What to Promote (How to Enter)

• Customers get one entry into the contest for every dollar they spend on your store during the duration of the contest. If they spend $50, they get 50 entries.

• Give them bonus entries for all orders over $100 (this will boost AOV). So, if they spend $100, they get their 100 entries by default, plus 100 bonus entries.

By doing this, you are accomplishing three things:

• You are converting new customers at a more efficient rate (lower CPA)

• You are increasing the AOV (people will spend more to try and get bonus entries)

• You are increasing the LTV of your customers (you will get a lot more repeat customers because of the contest.

Super Bonus: If you are a business that has a subscription model or subscriptions play a big part in your revenue, make the contest for subscribers only. It will help you convert a ton of one-time or sporadic customers into regular subscribers.

Here are some extra things that you should do when doing a contest:

• Use an app such as ViralSweep (no affiliation) to allow people to get extra bonus entries for doing things like sharing your contest on social media (organic multiplier), or signing up for your email list. This can really add up and increase the effectiveness of the contest.

• Make sure that there is a "free" way to enter the contest. This may be required depending on your jurisdiction, because if there is no "free" way to enter, it can be considered gambling in certain states/countries/etc. For this, I usually have a form on my contest page where they can sign up to get one entry into the contest.

Here is how you multiply your results and make it much more profitable than it would be otherwise. This is optional but highly, highly recommended:

• If you can't think of a prize, offer a gift card to your own store for $2,000 (or something) as the prize. This is so good because the $2,000 is retail value, not your cost of goods. If you give away a $2,000 gift card, it will only cost you about $500 - $1,000 if you have 50-75% gross margins like you should.

• Give away someone else's product(s). They will supply the product and you give it away. That makes it free for you, and it gets attention for their brand. But that's not all, after the contest is over, you should sign up for their affiliate program, offer a special discount to their store for all of your contest customers, and then collect $20+ per customer referred. This can add thousands of dollars in pure profit to your contest.

3. Selling Leads

This one was given to me by Will Green from Copy Road. 

Check out his website at https://copyroad.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/thecopyroad.

This one has to do with selling leads.

It is one of the most profitable things you can ever do and it can totally revolutionize your business.

The idea here is to sell leads as part of your post-purchase upsell.

The best way to explain it is with an example, so here it goes:

Let's say you sell supplements to women in the United States. You have a lot of customers, who are presumably trying to live a healthier life, right?

Makes sense.

Instead of trying to squeak out a 10-20% post purchase upsell rate and squeeze another dollar of two profit per order, you should instead sell those leads to service businesses that sell services to the same type of customers you do.

In this example, let's say you sell your leads to an online personal training company.

It would normally be illegal and ineffective to just give them the names, emails, phone numbers, etc., of all your customers.

You would get shut down pretty quickly for being non-compliant, and it wouldn't really work anyways because those people would not be expecting to hear from a personal trainer.

Instead, offer the service company's FREE lead magnet as your post purchase upsell instead of an additional product or bundle.

In this example, maybe the personal training company was offering a free 21-day challenge where the user would lose a minimum of 5 lbs.

This is what you would offer on your post purchase upsell page. You would say, "we have partnered with the world's best weight loss company blah blah blah and they've agreed to give you this challenge for FREE (normal cost $597).

When you offer a free lead magnet as your upsell, the normal 5-20% take rate balloons to 30-70% quite quickly.

It also checks all the boxes. They have indicated they are interested in the free upsell, you have a note on the upsell page saying that they are giving consent if they accept, and you have their contact information already.

Once they have accepted the upsell (in this example, they have clicked YES, they want to be part of this weight loss challenge), then you can set up a Zapier or other tool to sync their contact information directly to your partner's CPM (you can do this using a Tag for upsell orders).

Then, the partner can reach out to them by email, sms, phone or whatever to get them set up on the weight loss challenge.

Here's the thing, and why this is so profitable.

The personal training company would likely have to spend $100 - $200 to get someone on the phone for their weight loss challenge, and they would likely not close them all either.

You can sell them the leads that you are generating through your upsell for $30 (just an example). That is cheaper than they would be able to generate through advertising (for a phone call lead), and these leads would be much, much, much more qualified as they come from a paying customer that already trusts the eCommerce Brand (your brand) enough to purchase their product. That trust carries over. They are not just random leads that have half-assed filled out a form. They are about as quality as it could get.

Do the math. If you had a 50% take rate for this free challenge and you charged them $30 per lead, that would add $15 in pure profit to every single order ($30 x 0.5 = $15). A $15 boost to your profit margin on every single order would change your business forever.

4. Referral Coupons

This is another marketing tactic that can kill two birds with one stone.

Here's what you do:

• Find 50-100 brands that do not sell the same product(s) as you, but sell to the same type of customers. Essentially, the same type of brands you would partner with for the joint giveaways in the first part of this document.

• Contact them all and ask if you can refer your customers to their brand

• A few of them will say yes, and you will get your own unique offer/discount code that you can use to promote to your own customers.

• On your website (there are multiple good places for this), you should have a little blurb that says something along the lines of "when you buy from us, you will also get over $1,000 (example) of discounts from other brands you'll love."

• When people buy, send them an email containing all of their discounts, and if you have a subscription portal or customer area on your website, you can include it there too. I would recommend sending them these discount codes four times over the course of two months after they buy in order to maximize their effect.

This accomplishes several things. 

• First of all, it improves your offer. Now, not only are they getting your product, but they are also getting over $1,000 in discounts from brands that they might be interested in. It increases the value of your offer by quite a bit.

This has been known to increase conversion rate quite substantially, and the better known and more sought after your partners, the more it will increase your conversion rate.

• You can also set it up with your partners that for every new customer you generate for them, you will get a $20 commission (example).

Think about that for a moment. Let's say that your customer acquisition cost is $30, and you have 10 partners each giving you a $20 commission for any sale.

If a customer ends up buying from just one of any of those ten partners, you will get a $20 commission and all of a sudden, the cost to acquire that customer will drop 66% (from $30 to $10). That changes the math and economics of your business entirely.

Of course, not every customer will use these discounts, but if one customer uses four, that is $80 in commission/pure margin. When this is averaged out, you can reduce your effective CPA by $4-8 in this example.

5. Charity Events

The last idea in this blog posts is charity events.

This isn't the lame, boring, played-out "part of every sale is donated to charity." That might have a small positive effect, but nothing like this.

Let's get started:

People like to feel good about the companies they buy for. While it isn't a requirement (we all buy from many terrible, terrible companies whether we like it or not), it can give you a positive upswing if your business is seen in a good light by your customers and the world.

Here's what to do:

• Identify up to 100 charities that at least kind of relate to your product. If you sold dog supplements for example, you could reach out to Dog Rescue organizations. If you sold American Flags, maybe you'd reach out to some charities that support Veterans.

It's not necessarily required that the charity be similar to your product, but it sure makes a lot more sense when you try to pitch them on the idea.

• Ask them to partner with you for a "special charity event" where for the duration (example: a weekend), all of the profits from your store will be donated to their charity.

This is one of the best ways to gain thousands of new customers in a short period of time.

However, you have to get a few things in place from the charity for it to be successful.

• They must agree to promote your company to their donors/email list/social media/etc. during the duration of the event. They must tell their supporters to go to your website and buy your products because all of the profits are being donated to them.

Of course we want to donate to charity because it is the right thing to do, but we can't bankrupt ourselves doing so. This is a fair deal because the charity gets money and you get new customers/exposure that you didn't have before and their supporters get your products (which are obviously high quality).

• They must send you proof that you donated. Post this on your website to prove that you actually donated the proceeds or people will always question you.

These things are perfectly reasonable to ask for and they will help you get thousands of new customers in one fell swoop.

Of course, you won't make any profit from these as you are donating it, but there is a chance those customers will buy again and tell their friends and family about your business.

Conclusion

When you are talking about exponential growth for an eCommerce Store, these are five of the top ways to achieve it.

These things are either free to do or cost very little and can get you a thousand or more new customers at once. If you stay consistent with it and do all five of these things over the course of a year, your business can literally 5-10x.

Not only will you get tons and tons of new customers from the partner giveaways, monthly contests and charity events, but you will be able to generate so much more profit (think 5-20x) as much from selling leads and getting referral commissions that you will be able to increase your ad spend by 2x, 3x, 5x, or even 10x.

All of these strategies benefit from each other. By selling leads, you will be able to increase your ad spend, and by increasing ad spend, you will get more leads to sell. When you have more leads/customers, you will gain access to bigger partners and will be able to get more new customers from each giveaway (which also gives you more leads to sell), which will also make charities more interested in partnering with you because your size and reputation are bigger. This will get you more customers, and more leads, and allow you to do bigger contests that get more attention.

It is all just one big cycle. You should hire someone full time to implement this strategy, or do it yourself. Don't just turn on some ads, write some blog posts, and hope for the best. This is the way. Take advantage of it.