E-commerce: $100k in one hour

[deepneuralnet]

Congrats mate. Process->Event

 

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[MartijnS]

We did about $94k in ONE HOUR (just shy of $100k, hehe), BUT our total for the day ended up at $108,000. Check the Shopify screenshot. Feels good to get an over $100k deposit in your bank account for one day of sales!

We ran a 20% off our entire website for ONE HOUR only. We don't run promotions often, as we believe it dilutes your brand over time. We sell high dollar widgets (over $500) with lower-dollar accessory widgets that compliment the high dollar ones. So here was our strategy:

Congrats! Must have felt pretty sweet!

Playing devil's advocate though and just trying to ask critical questions:
You're talking about sales, and you had a 20% discount on the widgets, so the question then remains of course how much that cut into your margins.

I mean, you can have a mega sale and discount down right to the COGS without any profit margin left, and sell $1M in an hours, but all you have to show for then is sales numbers and maybe new customers, but zero profit.

So how far down do you go?

That being said, if you have non tangible widgets - ie ebooks or software as a service, the costs become minimal and these kinda sales generally will still have relatively high profits.

Thoughts?

Martijn

 

[Ronak]

Lower unit margin, but you make sales that otherwise wouldn't have happened. A good tool to use in a surgical manner, and assuming the gross margin isn't cut to zero, the volume bump more than makes up for the lower margin. Key number is total gross profit, which can be several weeks worth of normal profits.

 

[JasonR]

Lower unit margin, but you make sales that otherwise wouldn't have happened. A good tool to use in a surgical manner, and assuming the gross margin isn't cut to zero, the volume bump more than makes up for the lower margin. Key number is total gross profit, which can be several weeks worth of normal profits.

You're close...

There's another metric that is super important in business - whether you're selling a company or running a healthy one, and that's your return on capital. ROC is NOT talked about enough IMO.

Basically, think of it this way. Your return on capital decreases the longer your capital is tied up. So, the longer your inventory turns (or the slower you turn over your inventory), the less efficient your business is, as you could have used that capital for anything else (other/new products, other investments, taking personal profits, etc.).

So, all things being equal, a business that has a better/higher return on capital will generally be valued better than the same business who isn't as efficient with their capital.

Discounting/sales (like the one I ran) is a way to PROFITABLY in crease your ROC. Of course, this is a tool/lever to use in the business, and it's not one that can be repeatedly hammered. It should be used strategically.

 

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[biophase]

You're talking about sales, and you had a 20% discount on the widgets, so the question then remains of course how much that cut into your margins.

Generally E-commerce stores have much better margins than 20%.

Imagine your product is selling for $100. Most COGS plus shipping would be around $35-$60. So selling at $80 decreases your profits by 50%. But you are still doing very well.

It’s hard to believe someone would have $80 COGS on a $100 product. That store would last long, unless it was a dropship store.

I don’t do a 20% sale but rather a buy one get something free. In the example above you can give up $20 cash or instead give them a $20 product for free that costs you $5. Same value to the customer but you make an extra $15.

 

[theag]

It's a nice tactic. I have a friend who ran sth similar on black friday. It was even higher, I think 300k+ in an hour, and most of it in the first few minutes. Pretty crazy stuff.

What they did a bit differently, was to run lead gen ads specifically for this offer. So they collected leads weeks in advance of BF and didn't send them any other offer. Just a few reminders of the upcoming deal and to be ready when it starts at 8pm or whatever, the usual scarcity stuff

I'm not sure if its really worth it to delay the revenue though. And if it's an increase compared to continously running "normal" ads instead of the lead gen.

But it definitely helps to avoid cheapening the brand with too many sales. And easier to build hype/scarcity around these short time windows.

Thats why we only do 2-3 sales a year (usually around easter, black friday, and 1-2 more). We have a bit bigger time window though (2-3 days each). But in that timeframe we hit hard (3-4 emails/day).

Interesting note: our best performing emails is usually the "day after"-email with something along the lines of "did you miss the sale, too? we extended it for you, but it ends this evening! (image of big animated countdown)"

Works well

 

[doster.zach]

I wanted to share something very cool, and very actionable for all the e-com guys here. This doesn't work if you don't have a business or an email/customer list, but it works like CRAZY if:
You don't abuse your e-mail list
You email often (value driven, you just don't hammer campaigns/sales emails out)
You don't run promotions often .

First, results.

We did about $94k in ONE HOUR (just shy of $100k, hehe), BUT our total for the day ended up at $108,000. Check the Shopify screenshot. Feels good to get an over $100k deposit in your bank account for one day of sales!

We ran a 20% off our entire website for ONE HOUR only. We don't run promotions often, as we believe it dilutes your brand over time. We sell high dollar widgets (over $500) with lower-dollar accessory widgets that compliment the high dollar ones. So here was our strategy:

We announced our intention of the sale 5 days in advance. We included calendar links in the email. We made sure to reinforce that: 1) we very, very rarely do this and 2) the sale will be honored for one hour only, so be prepared.

We excluded anyone who bought a high dollar widget in the last 6 months. If they bought a high dollar widget, we sent them a separate email campaign on 20% off all accessory, lower-priced widgets.

We emailed them 3 days before the sale with a reminder and in our weekly blog post (content) promotion spot.

We sent this to 17,269 email subscribers (some customers, some not)

We reminded them a day before the sale via email.

We reminded them again, the morning of.

We then emailed them for the sale at kick off.

We emailed them one more time at the 30 minute mark "Last Chance"

We also designed the sale around peak traffic time on Sundays (specifically a weekend so fewer people will be at work).

We offered no phone support at this time (our phone is active M-F).

We were hoping for $50k, and we blew past that! Ended up at $108,000 for the day. That's about $6.25 per email subscriber (for the e-mail marketing geeks out there).

We used Klaviyo for our email campaigns. We heavily segment our customers based on a variety of factors - so our list has already been pruned and engaged for a long time.

If you use this technique/sale, post your results!

Disclaimer: this was not my own unique idea. I got the idea from a private forum, but I wanted to share our results with you.

We are now planning to do something like this at least two times a year but no more than three times. Again, you don't want to train customers to wait for sales and discount your brand. A further note, we've been running our business for about three years, so don't expect this to work at your one-month old e-com start up.

I've seen some crazy numbers from Shopify but nothing quite like this before! Sales and discounts are becoming very common for e-commerce, this is very impressive that you drove this much in sales. Congratulations on reaching that mark!

 

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[MitchC]

Generally E-commerce stores have much better margins than 20%.

Imagine your product is selling for $100. Most COGS plus shipping would be around $35-$60. So selling at $80 decreases your profits by 50%. But you are still doing very well.

It’s hard to believe someone would have $80 COGS on a $100 product. That store would last long, unless it was a dropship store.

I don’t do a 20% sale but rather a buy one get something free. In the example above you can give up $20 cash or instead give them a $20 product for free that costs you $5. Same value to the customer but you make an extra $15.

Not to mention that the promotion was an email which saves the ad cost.

20% of your gross sales being your ad spend would be a 5x ROAs which is almost unheard of, especially at this scale.

I calculate my email sales and referral sales based around my typical CPA since I am saving that cost anyway.

 

[Ivan2BAlive]

Congrats on your 100k + in one day.

 

[Ronak]

Thanks, Jason for sharing this important thought about earning $100k in one hour when you have all these things that are required

Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but this, along with your avatar, comes across as sarcastic, negative, and spammy.

 

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[Fasoon]

First, we continually write USEFUL content. Think of things like "How to" guides, location guides, and 10 Best Widget guides. Articles that are actually useful and want to be read. We do this to rank organically (SEO) and we also email these articles.

Here's an example of our weekly campaign strategy:

Key:
(OEW = Ordered Expensive Widget)


(DNOEW = Did Not Order Expensive widget)
Tuesdays: x2 campaigns sent at same time
Content: Blog campaign
x1 email sent to OWE segment
x1 email sent to DNOWE segment

Purpose: Provide value, plug different products at the bottom of the email based on purchase history.
>> i.e. DNOWE gets an Expensive Widget at bottom of email, OEW gets an accessory at bottom of email

Thursdays: x2 campaigns sent at same time
Content: Promotional campaign
x1 email sent to OEW segment
x1 email sent to DNOEW segment
Purpose: Send DNOEW an Expensive Widget, send OEW an accessory/collection

Note: Sometimes these emails are not segmented by audience i.e. new product launch, items that appeal to both audiences, etc

Sundays: x2 campaigns sent at same time
Content: Promotional campaign
x1 email sent to OEW segment
x1 email sent to DNOEW segment
Purpose: Send OEW an Expensive Widget, send DNOWE an accessory/collection
Note: Sometimes these emails are not segmented by audience i.e. new product launch, items that appeal to both audiences

This is our campaign strategy. We have a lot of other "flows" (abandoned cart, abandoned collection, started order, etc.) that also drive quite a bit of revenue

I've also attached a screenshot of our "Flows" for the past year - which also drive a lot of revenue. You can see even in simple emails (order confirmation) we aim to drive revenue from each e-mail (without being too pushy).

This is an amazing read thanks for sharing so much insight.
Would you have any pointers where I can learn more about the flows? Our business at this point makes the same turnover in 2 months rather than one hour (gulp) but we are getting there. Definitely agree on don't oversaturated with sales and get creative in marketing meaningful content.

I have been hesitant to send out How To's but that's probably my personal thing to overcome as I don't see the value and not sure if someone would but will give this a try to keep subscribers engaged.

But before all that having more flows in place would be a great place to start if you can share any pointers.

 

[Zardiw]

We have a high end ($205/mo) software product for trading stocks. Been in business for over 15 years. Built up a list of about 1,100. Don't send out too many EMails. Only have Halloween and Christmas specials at about a %15 discount.

Current membership: around 100.

We do send out newsletters....but not that many....every few months.
Also send out alerts every once in awhile.

Tried this. Followed all the instructions. Also posted it on some major stock trading forums that we're pretty highly rated on.

The offer was for $147/mo ....... 28% discount from $205.

In the EMails also offered it to our existing members if they EMailed us during the hour of the special.

Results:
2 new signups
9 existing members wanted the special.

I'd say it failed........fwiw

Would appreciate any input as to why........

Not sure if posting our site is allowed, let me know if it isn't, and I'll edit it out.
Any input on it though would also be appreciated.....

DDAmanda.com


z

 

[JasonR]

Would you have any pointers where I can learn more about the flows? Our business at this point makes the same turnover in 2 months rather than one hour (gulp) but we are getting there. Definitely agree on don't oversaturated with sales and get creative in marketing meaningful content.

Hey don't knock yourself! $50k a month is a great start and you shouldn't have to worry about a job any more. Pat yourself on the back.

We plan to run sales like these 1-3 times a year, no more. Our annual turnover is in currently in the mid-to-high 7 figures, and we have quite a lot of customers and do a lot of paid acquisition as well.

As for flows, are you on Klaviyo? Is your business e-commerce? Let me know and I can try and point you in the right direction.

 

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[alexson]

That's a great strategy to earn $100k in one hour.

 

[Rafael Gervásio]

I wanted to share something very cool, and very actionable for all the e-com guys here. This doesn't work if you don't have a business or an email/customer list, but it works like CRAZY if:
You don't abuse your e-mail list
You email often (value driven, you just don't hammer campaigns/sales emails out)
You don't run promotions often .

First, results.

We did about $94k in ONE HOUR (just shy of $100k, hehe), BUT our total for the day ended up at $108,000. Check the Shopify screenshot. Feels good to get an over $100k deposit in your bank account for one day of sales!

We ran a 20% off our entire website for ONE HOUR only. We don't run promotions often, as we believe it dilutes your brand over time. We sell high dollar widgets (over $500) with lower-dollar accessory widgets that compliment the high dollar ones. So here was our strategy:

We announced our intention of the sale 5 days in advance. We included calendar links in the email. We made sure to reinforce that: 1) we very, very rarely do this and 2) the sale will be honored for one hour only, so be prepared.

We excluded anyone who bought a high dollar widget in the last 6 months. If they bought a high dollar widget, we sent them a separate email campaign on 20% off all accessory, lower-priced widgets.

We emailed them 3 days before the sale with a reminder and in our weekly blog post (content) promotion spot.

We sent this to 17,269 email subscribers (some customers, some not)

We reminded them a day before the sale via email.

We reminded them again, the morning of.

We then emailed them for the sale at kick off.

We emailed them one more time at the 30 minute mark "Last Chance"

We also designed the sale around peak traffic time on Sundays (specifically a weekend so fewer people will be at work).

We offered no phone support at this time (our phone is active M-F).

We were hoping for $50k, and we blew past that! Ended up at $108,000 for the day. That's about $6.25 per email subscriber (for the e-mail marketing geeks out there).

We used Klaviyo for our email campaigns. We heavily segment our customers based on a variety of factors - so our list has already been pruned and engaged for a long time.

If you use this technique/sale, post your results!

Disclaimer: this was not my own unique idea. I got the idea from a private forum, but I wanted to share our results with you.

We are now planning to do something like this at least two times a year but no more than three times. Again, you don't want to train customers to wait for sales and discount your brand. A further note, we've been running our business for about three years, so don't expect this to work at your one-month old e-com start up.

Thanks a lot of sharing!!!

 

[Black_Mamba_427]

Very inspiring! Interesting to read what you said about sales diluting the brands value.

I sell digital products and have started doing frequent sales maybe 6 months ago and seems to work quite well. My current sale is 30% off for the entire month of march and I've got maybe 8 planned for the year (some short/some long). I found that the customers who wanted the products would buy them and the ones you couldnt justify the cost would not. So when I run the sales, it seems to push through all customers to have a higher average customer spend in total. Perhaps the sales frequency is different if you're selling something physical where there is a baseline you have to beat to not sell at a loss (e.g. physical product, shipping etc) where as my digital products have zero shipping + infinite supply?

Maybe I should experiment by doing shorter 1 day sales or 1 hour sales and see how that goes.

100% Agree on email marketing though. I only started doing that in December 2021 and its like night/day the sales difference. When I drop new product (E.g. New episode within a video series) I can email everyone who purchased the previous episode and the conversion rate has been about 60-75%.

I'm using Gumroad's email marketing though which is a bit limited. It would be nice to be able to email customers who haven't purchased within say 6 months a unique discount code to get them back again though.

 

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[xShepherdx]

Huge value in this thread, thanks for sharing!

And congrats on a solid day, I hope you see many more like it!

I've also attached a screenshot of our "Flows" for the past year - which also drive a lot of revenue. You can see even in simple emails (order confirmation) we aim to drive revenue from each e-mail (without being too pushy).

This screenshot is pure gold.

A week ago, I realized I should be segmenting everything but I wasn't sure how best to do that, if it was overkill, etc.

And asking google "What e-commerce flows should I use" is useless unless you don't know that abandoned cart flows are a thing lol.

This screenshot gives me a ton of ideas (and confidence, really) to create the dozens of flows my business would benefit from.

As for flows, are you on Klaviyo? Is your business e-commerce? Let me know and I can try and point you in the right direction.

I'm not the person who asked originally, but I would also love to learn more about making proper e-commerce flows in Klaviyo.

I've dug through dozens of blog posts in the last week or so, but everything I can find is so generic that it's really just useless.

Any pointers/resources would be appreciated!

 

[Ayobami23]

Someone should like my comment please

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Someone should like my comment please

Your comments get “liked” when you provide value, not when you beg.

Likewise, you earn money when you provide value, not because you beg.

 

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[dsrbrands]

Crazy numbers. Love the idea, but I don't have 17k emails

 

[GaborBG]

I wanted to share something very cool, and very actionable for all the e-com guys here. This doesn't work if you don't have a business or an email/customer list, but it works like CRAZY if:
You don't abuse your e-mail list
You email often (value driven, you just don't hammer campaigns/sales emails out)
You don't run promotions often .

First, results.

We did about $94k in ONE HOUR (just shy of $100k, hehe), BUT our total for the day ended up at $108,000. Check the Shopify screenshot. Feels good to get an over $100k deposit in your bank account for one day of sales!

We ran a 20% off our entire website for ONE HOUR only. We don't run promotions often, as we believe it dilutes your brand over time. We sell high dollar widgets (over $500) with lower-dollar accessory widgets that compliment the high dollar ones. So here was our strategy:

We announced our intention of the sale 5 days in advance. We included calendar links in the email. We made sure to reinforce that: 1) we very, very rarely do this and 2) the sale will be honored for one hour only, so be prepared.

We excluded anyone who bought a high dollar widget in the last 6 months. If they bought a high dollar widget, we sent them a separate email campaign on 20% off all accessory, lower-priced widgets.

We emailed them 3 days before the sale with a reminder and in our weekly blog post (content) promotion spot.

We sent this to 17,269 email subscribers (some customers, some not)

We reminded them a day before the sale via email.

We reminded them again, the morning of.

We then emailed them for the sale at kick off.

We emailed them one more time at the 30 minute mark "Last Chance"

We also designed the sale around peak traffic time on Sundays (specifically a weekend so fewer people will be at work).

We offered no phone support at this time (our phone is active M-F).

We were hoping for $50k, and we blew past that! Ended up at $108,000 for the day. That's about $6.25 per email subscriber (for the e-mail marketing geeks out there).

We used Klaviyo for our email campaigns. We heavily segment our customers based on a variety of factors - so our list has already been pruned and engaged for a long time.

If you use this technique/sale, post your results!

Disclaimer: this was not my own unique idea. I got the idea from a private forum, but I wanted to share our results with you.

We are now planning to do something like this at least two times a year but no more than three times. Again, you don't want to train customers to wait for sales and discount your brand. A further note, we've been running our business for about three years, so don't expect this to work at your one-month old e-com start up.

Very Nice!!!

 

[Conor Foley]

I wanted to share something very cool, and very actionable for all the e-com guys here. This doesn't work if you don't have a business or an email/customer list, but it works like CRAZY if:
You don't abuse your e-mail list
You email often (value driven, you just don't hammer campaigns/sales emails out)
You don't run promotions often .

First, results.

We did about $94k in ONE HOUR (just shy of $100k, hehe), BUT our total for the day ended up at $108,000. Check the Shopify screenshot. Feels good to get an over $100k deposit in your bank account for one day of sales!

We ran a 20% off our entire website for ONE HOUR only. We don't run promotions often, as we believe it dilutes your brand over time. We sell high dollar widgets (over $500) with lower-dollar accessory widgets that compliment the high dollar ones. So here was our strategy:

We announced our intention of the sale 5 days in advance. We included calendar links in the email. We made sure to reinforce that: 1) we very, very rarely do this and 2) the sale will be honored for one hour only, so be prepared.

We excluded anyone who bought a high dollar widget in the last 6 months. If they bought a high dollar widget, we sent them a separate email campaign on 20% off all accessory, lower-priced widgets.

We emailed them 3 days before the sale with a reminder and in our weekly blog post (content) promotion spot.

We sent this to 17,269 email subscribers (some customers, some not)

We reminded them a day before the sale via email.

We reminded them again, the morning of.

We then emailed them for the sale at kick off.

We emailed them one more time at the 30 minute mark "Last Chance"

We also designed the sale around peak traffic time on Sundays (specifically a weekend so fewer people will be at work).

We offered no phone support at this time (our phone is active M-F).

We were hoping for $50k, and we blew past that! Ended up at $108,000 for the day. That's about $6.25 per email subscriber (for the e-mail marketing geeks out there).

We used Klaviyo for our email campaigns. We heavily segment our customers based on a variety of factors - so our list has already been pruned and engaged for a long time.

If you use this technique/sale, post your results!

Disclaimer: this was not my own unique idea. I got the idea from a private forum, but I wanted to share our results with you.

We are now planning to do something like this at least two times a year but no more than three times. Again, you don't want to train customers to wait for sales and discount your brand. A further note, we've been running our business for about three years, so don't expect this to work at your one-month old e-com start up.

@JasonR, really great & practical story! What really stands out to me here is when you mention "we heavily segment our customers"...

Having personally worked with some of the fastest growing companies in the UK & Ireland this is one area companies are seriously lacking!

Not every individual thinks the same or is influenced in the same manner but by using the right metrics we can place customer into brackets and create a promotional offer to suit them at scale. When done right we see results like the above and even higher when we consider the LTV (Lifetime Value) of customers

 

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