How to Scale Your eCommerce Business

There’s a critical time that comes after the launch of an eCommerce business. You thought it was hard enough just finding the idea, developing the products, and then going live. But getting a product online is half the battle. After launch, your CPG marketing efforts are crucial to your overall success, and it’s the ability to scale and sustain itself long-term that will determine success or failure. This article will give you some tips for moving past launch to build a scalable eCommerce business.

Building Scale in an eCommerce Business

Creating a CPG marketing campaign for your eCommerce business is critical for growth. Entrepreneur succinctly and wisely says, “You cannot grow without marketing.” This effort to build your brand should never stop. To scale the business, use CPG marketing to increase sales even when customers are buying your products. It is this momentum building action that will keep your brand going long-term.

One big mistake new business owners make is to stop selling. There’s a good reason for why this happens so frequently; business owners are so busy fulfilling orders and completing the work that they don’t have time to invest in CPG marketing. But using social media and email marketing to build your brand is a long-term effort that can never slow down or falter no matter how busy you are.

Along the same lines, new eCommerce business owners often find themselves doing it all, including fulfilling orders. It’s a big dilemma; orders are coming in, but the business hasn’t scaled. So the owner sits in the living room packing boxes, printing shipping labels, and fulfilling orders. To scale your eCommerce business, consider partnering with a fulfillment service to complete orders. Your job is to build the brand and work on sales. To scale, let someone else handle the order fulfillment. 

Creating a Scalable eCommerce Strategy

While your CPG marketing strategy focuses on building new customers, a scalable eCommerce strategy should include developing customer service policies that retain nearly all of your prior clients. The adage that it costs more to seek new customers than it does to retain the olds ones is true. 

For your eCommerce business to scale, you must develop and conduct CPG marketing to find new clients, but you must also have policies in place to keep your existing customers satisfied. Particularly in the early days of an eCommerce business, every complaint should lead to internal action that improves the product or delivery. 

Remember the power of the customer complaint when coupled with Internet reviews. To scale, try to replace every negative customer experience with policies that support a better experience. Then use CPG marketing to go back and get those happy customers to buy more.

While these are just a few tips for scaling your eCommerce business, they solve some of the most common problems we see in the early days of these businesses. Follow these rules, and your business is more likely to scale.

As you work on scaling your eCommerce business, don’t forget to set some benchmarks at the beginning of your project so that you can gauge what is working and where you may be missing opportunities. If you need some help, we’ve put together a CPG marketing tracking template to get you started. Fill out the form below to gain immediate access to our sample spreadsheet, "CPG Digital Marketing Campaign Performance Benchmarks," to use as a guide.