Have you been struggling to scale to 7 or 8 figures for your ecom brand? Do you feel like you have a great product but you’re struggling to crack the code to exponentially increase your revenue while staying profitable?

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After helping 50+ brands scale in 2023 alone, our team has built a reliable and consistent strategy that you can implement in today’s DTC landscape.

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Before we get started, there’s an important note to keep in mind.

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Growing your brand is a lot like building a racecar.

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You can have a powerful engine, but if you don’t have strong brakes, you won’t make it past the first turn.

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A racecar is only as good as all of the pieces of the car working together to build a fluid system.

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Just like in marketing, pulling one growth lever won’t turn your brand into a massive 8-figure business. To build a brand that has longevity and consistent profits, you need to factor in all aspects of your growth strategy to get the results you want.

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Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into your growth strategy!

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First and foremost, let’s dive into the core of your brand: your website.

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Your website is going to be a make or break for your brand’s profit so make sure you are putting focus into the customer journey to get your conversion rate as high as possible.

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Do not overthink your website though!

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Your website has one goal: answer the questions that your shoppers have in order to make an educated buying decision.

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The best websites in the world are the ones that focus on building value and showing shoppers how their product will solve their problems and make a difference in their lives.

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If you’ve read “Building A Storybrand” by Donald Miller, you’ll know that your customer is the hero of the story and your product is the tool that will help them complete their quest.

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For example, if you’re selling supplements, you need to focus on how your products will help your customers reach their health goals.

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Don’t over complicate your site with too much information about the product itself! You need to show your customers how your product will help them.

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For example, if you’re selling an energy gel for cyclists with a specific carbohydrate mix, mention the mix and explain how that ratio will help the cyclist win their next race.

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“Our gels have a proprietary mix of 40g of carbs with 200mg of sodium to ensure you have energy for your whole race without fear of cramping when the pace gets hard!”

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This is a great way to share the features (carbs and sodium) of your product while showing the benefits of those features.

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People don’t care about the features as much as you think. They care about whether your product will solve their problem. In this case, the problem is having energy at the end of the race and being scared of cramps.

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A lot of this information can be shared through copy of course, but it’s important to focus on tying your website experience together with high-quality content that provides context.

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To bring this all together, the flow should look something like this.

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1. Content to show the aspiration of your shopper.
2. Benefits to explain that your product solves their problem.
3. Features to explain the product why the product solves their problem.

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But what about landing pages?

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Once you have your core website built out, it’s time to consider building a landing page for your ads and emails that we will cover later.

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Keep in mind, not all brands need landing pages!

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In fact, we’ve seen product pages outperform landing pages for lots of brands, especially brands in the fashion space or on sites that people spend a lot of time browsing.

We’ve seen landing pages perform well for brands that need a lot of product education or for brands that are marketing a specific problem that their product is solving.

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Going back to our energy gel for cyclist example, a great landing page to test would be something around cramping.

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For example, building a page around the headline “How Elite Cyclists Are Killing Cramps With XYZ Brand” could be a great intro to a listicle that focuses on benefits and education before pitching products.

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Speaking of listicles, let’s shift our focus to who we are driving to this listicle and how we are getting them there.

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For most DTC brands, Meta is going to be the first place to advertise.

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Let’s break down the strategy that will help you scale your brand in 2024.

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Instead of beating a dead horse and telling you how broad is the winner for Meta, we are going to focus on a few different aspects of paid media that you can implement today.

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Keep in mind that there isn’t a one size fits all strategy for Meta and what works for one brand might not work for another brand due to different audiences, brand equity, gross margin, etc…

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With that out of the way, let’s dive into Meta!

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For 2024, it’s going to be increasingly important to get specific with your problem, solution, and post-click experience.

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The best way to illustrate this is going back to our cyclist example from earlier.

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Push out an ad that calls out losing cyclist races due to cramping (problem)

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Push out an ad that shows a cyclist using your product to put an end to cramps and show them winning their race.

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Send them to the listicle you made earlier.

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Sell, sell, sell!

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There are a few things to point out here.

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First, and most importantly, the ad and the landing page are emphasizing and solving the same problem.

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Both of them are showing how your products are solving the cramping problem while helping cyclists reach their goals.

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With this strategy, you’re instantly going to connect and spark curiosity with people who are aware of their cramping problem.

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We call this the problem aware strategy.

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Another strategy that works well for brands is the goal aware strategy.

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This strategy is similar, but has a key difference.

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Instead of focusing on the problem, we focus on the goal.

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In the example above, we would focus on winning more races, not reducing cramping.

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This strategy is going to connect with people who aren’t sure why they aren’t reaching their goal, but they know they need to make a change. This strategy is especially effective for less obvious solutions, so cramping is probably not an ideal problem here since everyone knows when they cramp!

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A simple ad concept would be something along the lines of:

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Are you putting the training hours in but you’re still struggling to win races? Maybe it’s your mid-race nutrition! Learn how XYZ Brand is helping cyclists like you win more races this season.

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This strategy is calling out their lack of goal resolution and begins to present the problem and a solution.

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Remember, this person doesn’t know why they aren’t reaching their goals, so you need to make them problem aware!

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As you start scaling up your ads and driving more traffic to your site, it’s going to become increasingly important to collect as many emails as possible.

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Email list building is something you should be doing since day 1 because realistically it’s one of the few things that you own 100% regardless of platform changes.

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But what do you do with that email list and why is email so important?

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According to Klaviyo’s Ecommerce Benchmarks Report, email represents an average of 27% of revenue for ecommerce brands.

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So in other words, if you aren’t pushing hard in your email channel, you are leaving a lot of revenue on the table.

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But not just revenue… profit.

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In fact, email marketing is one of the most, if not the most, consistently profitable channels for ecommerce brands simply because you’re talking to warm or hot audiences already. These people know your brand and already raised their hand to say they are interested in learning more about your brand.

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This is low hanging fruit!

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For many brands, email makes up the difference between profitability and burning cash due to LTV patterns and high customer acquisition costs from paid channels like Meta and Google.

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This is especially true for brands that struggle to be profitable on first purchases and need to lean into repeat order to actually make money.

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So what do you need to be focusing on to maximize your email profits?

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For 2024, you need to be focusing on two areas: education and personalization. For this article, we are going to focus on your ongoing email efforts instead of your flows (welcome, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, post purchase, review collection, etc…).

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Let’s break these two areas down.

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Our first area is education.

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Remember, your website’s purpose is to answer the questions that people have in order to make an educated buying decision.

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Email is no different. In fact, due to the frequency of emails, you can actually educate your customers a lot more. Instead of just having a few sections on your products or landing pages about your brand and value prop you can send emails specifically about your brand and different value props.

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This will help emphasize key aspects of your products without being overwhelming for shoppers.

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Answer their questions that they haven’t even thought about and bring them back to your site for a purchase.

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The next area is personalization.

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When it comes to email marketing, segmentation is one of the best things you can do to squeeze out as much profitability as you can.

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You can go deep on segmentation!

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Going back to our cycling nutrition example again, here are a few ways we can segment our audience to make the most of email marketing.

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First up, we can focus on the type of cyclist they are. Are they a hardcore racer that trains daily? Or are they a casual weekend warrior that just rides a couple days a week and doesn’t race at all?

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Why is this important?

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These two people need to be talked to very differently and you can mold your emails to fit your audience.

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These people care about different things and have different goals for using your product. The racer wants to win more races and the weekend warrior wants to stay healthy and active.

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Crossing over the language from these audiences can quickly alienate your customers and make them feel like your products aren’t in line with their goals. But with targeted segmentation, we can market your products exactly how your customers want to be marketed to.

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Another way we can segment your audience is by types of product they are interested in.

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For our cycling nutrition example, are they interested in your mid-race nutrition or your recovery products? Maybe they are interested in hydration!

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By segmenting your audience by product type, you can use this to your advantage to market the products they are going to like the most while also having the ability to cross sell other products from a complementary angle!

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But how do we segment?

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There are a few tools that can help you collect and organize this zero-party data.

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JustUno is a Shopify App that allows you to create custom pop-ups to gather information about your audience.  Instead of just trading an email for 10%, you can ask a couple questions as well so you can learn more about your audience as you grow your list.

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Another great tool for zero-party data collection is Fairing. Fairing’s customizable surveys can help you gather and organize data from shoppers to learn more about what drove their purchase decision and what they actually care about.

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With both of these apps, we can use custom tags within Klaviyo to sync everything together and build lists based on the data collected.

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Pretty cool huh?

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Throughout this article, you’ve learned about the importance of the three pillars of efficiently scaling your brand.

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By combining a powerful website with targeted landing pages, strong ads, and segmented emails, you can start scaling your brand profitably and faster than ever before.