How to Scale an E-commerce Business: 7 Key Strategies for Sustainable Growth
With nearly 9% growth projected this year, e-commerce companies are set to boom.
But starting an e-commerce business is only half the battle. The real question is: how to scale an e-commerce business without affecting your current budget.
Scaling isn’t about growing your sales numbers; it’s about achieving sustainable growth that helps your business thrive. This requires a strategic approach that goes beyond simply increasing product offers or investing more in marketing.
This blog post will explore key strategies that will help you scale an e-commerce business effectively and sustainably.
What is Scaling in Business?
Scaling a business refers to the process of expanding a company’s online operations, revenue, and marketing while maintaining profitability. It’s about growing your business without compromising on quality and efficiency.
The key aspects of scaling a business include:
- Increased revenue: Scaling focuses on generating more sales to increase overall profits.
- Expanded market reach: You can reach newer markets and a wider customer base.
- Efficient growth: Growing the business in a way that increases profits without increasing overhead costs.
- Sustainable growth: Ensuring that scaling does not interfere with the company’s long-term health and sustainability.
If you’re new in the business world, scaling a company and business growth could sound similar. However, they are different aspects of business development.
The Difference Between Scaling and Growth
Both scaling and growth focus on increasing company size and operations, but they have distinct nuances, outlined in the table below.
| Aspect | Scaling | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Keeping costs under control while increasing efficiency and expanding business operations. | Increasing business size, often with a proportional increase in costs. |
| Revenue and costs | Revenue increases exponentially while costs may increase at a slower rate. | Revenue and costs increase simultaneously and proportionally. |
| Focus | Efficiency and profitability | Expansion of the business |
| Usage of resources | Better use of existing resources to drive revenue. | Introduces new resources to drive growth. |
| Sustainability | It can lead to increased sustainability if handled well. | The business can become unsustainable if growth outpaces the company’s capacity. |
| Risk | Lower risk since scaling focuses on controlled growth. | Higher risk due to the need for extra resources and investment. |
| Example scenario | Using automation software to handle a larger customer base. | Hiring more employees to handle extra workload. |
While growth is a common goal for many companies, scaling can ensure that the expansion is sustainable and profitable.
We’ll review the critical steps in scaling an e-commerce business.
Essential Steps in Scaling an E-commerce Business
As an e-commerce business, scaling could require multiple approaches — you must align your website content to suit the audience’s preferences, expand product offerings, utilize content marketing, and build a strong brand identity.
The table consolidates the essential steps to scale your e-commerce business.
| Step | Description | Key Action |
|---|---|---|
| Market research and analysis | Understand your target market and customers’ needs before scaling. | ‣ Conduct competitor analysis, ‣ Analyze market trends, ‣ Get customer feedback |
| Build a scalable infrastructure | Verify if your website, payment processes, and other business aspects can handle increased traffic. | ‣ Optimize website performance, ‣ Secure payment gateways, ‣ Automate order fulfillment, ‣ Upgrade hosting |
| Focus on branding and positioning | Create a strong brand identity that lets customers differentiate your business from competitors. | ‣ Improve branding visuals, ‣ Create a compelling tagline or slogan, ‣ Create a unique selling proposition |
| Invest in customer acquisition channels | Allocate resources to paid ads, email marketing, and social media to increase customer base. | ‣ Improve SEO strategies, ‣ Scale PPC campaigns, ‣ Launch referral programs, ‣ Grow your email list |
| Optimize product offering | Refine your product catalog based on customer feedback and purchase history. | ‣ Conduct A/B testing, ‣ Offer bundled products, ‣ Introduce new products |
| Use automation and technology | Leverage automation software to streamline operations, customer support, and inventory management. | ‣ Use chatbots, ‣ Inventory software, ‣ CRM, ‣ And marketing tools |
| Strengthen supply chain | Ensure a strong and reliable supply chain to prevent stock outs. | ‣ Optimize inventory management, ‣ Partner with suppliers, ‣ Forecast demand |
| Improve customer experience | Deliver excellent user experience and customer service to improve loyalty. | ‣ Improve website UI & UX, ‣ Offer responsive support, ‣ Provide personalized recommendations |
| Adapt new marketing channels | Tap into new sales and marketing channels such as social media, ads, etc. | ‣ Launch a mobile app, ‣ List products on Amazon, Etsy, etc ‣ Adapt to the current marketing trends and medium |
| Build a strong team | Manage increased workload by hiring new staff or outsourcing key areas. | ‣ Recruit reliable people for separate departments such as marketing and sales |
| Explore finance options | Seek funding if needed to expand and grow your business. | ‣ Explore venture capital, ‣ Bank loans, ‣ Or crowdsource funding |
More than following the above steps, you need a robust business strategy to scale an e-commerce business effectively.
Let’s analyze the various strategies for scaling!
Strategies to Scale an E-commerce Company
With customers moving to AI-assisted shopping and newer technologies, it’s important to step up your e-commerce game.
Follow the strategies below to gain proper brand exposure.
Optimize Website and Performance
E-commerce businesses are entirely online, which means having a website is essential. When a new lead enters your marketing funnel, the website is the first place where they learn about your brand.
As you build or refine your website, ensure the following aspects:
- Verify that the website loads quickly and is easily navigable.
- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly to cater to the growing mobile shoppers.
- Design an intuitive website with clear calls-to-actions.
- Improve page loading times to reduce bounce rates.
- Use AI to recommend personalized products to visitors.
If you have products lined up on the website, ensure to provide search options or hamburger menus to select a category.
Use SEO and Content Marketing
If you’re a new e-commerce business, gaining traction can take time.
The best way to grow organically is to implement SEO best practices, such as the following:
- Identify relevant keywords related to your industry and products.
- Optimize your website’s content, meta tags, and headers on search engines.
- Create high-quality and engaging content to attract visitors.
- Build backlinks from reputable websites to increase search engine rankings.
Leverage Data and Analytics
Previous customer data can provide insights into the current and future customer behavior. For example, maybe a student from a regional area often purchases track pants and fitness gear. This data can help you refine your marketing strategies and attract similar customer segments.
You might also want to A/B test website elements such as CTA buttons, landing pages, and product descriptions to improve conversion rates. The easiest way is to use analytics tools such as Google Analytics, heatmaps, and funnel analysis to identify opportunities for growth.
Invest in Paid Advertising
Growing organically can take a lot of time. If you’re looking for quicker results, paid advertisements can help.
For example, you can invest in:
- Search engine marketing: Use Google Ads and Bing Ads to target customers looking for similar products as yours.
- Social media ads: Create visually appealing campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
- Retargeting ads: Re-engage visitors who didn’t convert the first time through targeted ads on social media.
Focus on Customer Retention
Retaining existing customers can be more effective than acquiring new ones. Once a person purchases from you and moves down the funnel, it’s critical to keep their attention with varied marketing tactics.
Implement the following strategies to retain customers:
- Email marketing: Build an email list to send personalized offers, new product announcements, and re-engagement campaigns
- Loyalty programs: Build a strong customer base by offering rewards for repeat purchases, referrals, and reviews.
- Subscription model: Consider offering a subscription based program where customers can purchase products on a regular basis. For example, you can offer subscriptions on personal grooming items such as shaving creams or razors.
Expand Product Offerings
Once you have a list of repeat buyers, you can upsell or cross sell to increase the average order value. Present these offers on the product checkout pages to increase the chances of a purchase. What you should definitely also do is implement email marketing to share regular offers, email coupons, and discounts as you move forward.
Enhance Brand Storytelling
People choose a brand for various reasons such as values, pricing, or convenience. Often, these people stay with an e-commerce brand because of a personal connection.
Storytelling is a fantastic way to tap into customer psychology and emotions. Share your brand history, special moments, or even failures. Keep the tone and branding consistent across channels.
If you want to stay in regular touch with customers, emails are the best way to do it.
How to Grow an E-commerce Business Using Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the powerful tools to connect with potential buyers and retain interest with current customers.
Once you have a permission-based email list, you can send the following to subscribers:
- Interactive emails to increase curiosity and email engagement,
- Re-engagement emails to persuade inactive subscribers to become a part of your brand again,
- Transactional emails to acknowledge a user action such as purchase confirmations, shipping details, etc,
- Reactivation emails to get customers back to your business,
- Sales emails to inform recipients and move them through the email marketing funnel,
- Send holiday email campaigns to tap into the excitement of shoppers during the special days.
- Send email marketing newsletters and product launch emails to keep customers updated about your brand.
You can do so much more with email marketing such as sending abandoned cart emails to drive engagement or implement retail email marketing to scale your e-commerce business.
Here’s how you can leverage email marketing to complement your e-commerce business.
Build a High-quality Email List
Your email list contains all your email marketing subscribers. It’s a powerful data source to help you pick the right people to send information to.
Follow these common best practices to build your email list:
- Offer incentives: Incentives encourage people to sign-up for your email list. Offer valuable discounts, coupons, and deals during the sign-up process.
- Capture emails at multiple touchpoints: Collect valid email addresses on your websites, checkout pages, and social media.
- Segment your email list: Use demographic segmentation, psychographic segmentation, and behavioral segmentation methods to divide your subscribers based on shared characteristics.
Create Engaging Email Content
While the email subject lines reflect your brand personality, your email content persuades customers to take action.
Here are the steps to create engaging email content:
- Personalize your emails: Use dynamic email content and email tags to tailor content according to the recipients’ preferences.
- Use clear subject lines: Based on your brand personality, you can include funny email subject lines. Ensure your subject lines are straightforward and reflect the main content of the email.
- Design visually appealing emails: Use email design best practices and use attractive email campaign templates.
- Include a strong CTA: Your call-to-action button is the final chance to encourage a recipient to become a customer. Keep the CTAs visually engaging and place them prominently in the emails.
Optimize Email Deliverability
A strong email deliverability ensures your emails do not come across spam traps and land in the subscribers’ primary inboxes. Inbox placement is a critical factor in determining the success of your e-commerce business.
The below guidelines will help you set up a proper email deliverability system:
- Maintain a clean email list: Maintain email list hygiene and regularly remove unwanted, inactive, and bounced email addresses.
- Avoid spam filters: Follow email security protocols and best practices to avoid spam filters and improve email deliverability.
- Use a reputable email marketing service: Choose an email provider with a good reputation for email deliverability rates. If you’re using an email client like Gmail or Yahoo, you can implement email deliverability tests to understand the effectiveness.
Send Targeted Campaigns to Scale your E-commerce Business
Email marketing allows you to send ultra-specific email marketing campaigns to different sets of subscribers. For example, you can welcome new subscribers and introduce your brand.
Then, follow-up with a promotional email to update customers on the latest products and discounts.
You can also send the following types of emails to engage recipients:
- Mass emails: Mass emails allow you to send the same information to everyone on your email list. It doesn’t require you to personalize each email, however, it’s better if you do. You can also send promotional emails and deals to target all subscribers at once.
- Abandoned cart emails: When customers leave carts for some reason, you can send them exciting discounts to recapture their interest. Use intriguing abandoned cart subject lines to hold their interest.
- Promotional emails: Send emails about new products, sales, or offers.
- Transactional emails: Inform customers about shipping confirmations, order confirmations, or password resets.
Measure and Analyze Results
Measuring each e-commerce email campaign will help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Measure the following email campaign metrics:
A/B test your marketing strategies and experiment with different subject lines, email content, and design. Use the analytics to refine your email marketing strategies and build targeted email campaigns.
Let’s nit-pick on the specific email campaigns you can send for your e-commerce business.
The Types of Email Marketing Campaigns to Help You Scale
The table below demonstrates the different email campaigns to use. Note that some of them can be triggered and depend on the nature of user action.
| Campaign Type | Purpose | Trigger/Event | Audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome series | Introduce your brand and build relationship with new subscribers | User signs-up and subscribes to your email list | New subscribers |
| Abandoned cart emails | Remind customers of the items left in their carts to encourage them to complete the purchase | Users that add items to the cart but doesn’t complete the purchase | Customers who leave items in their carts |
| Product recommendations | Suggest products based on a user’s previous purchase history | Post-purchase or after customers browse a specific item | Returning or past customers |
| Promotional campaigns | Announce special offers, discounts, or seasonal sales | Planned sales events (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) | General subscribers |
| Re-engagement emails | Encourage inactive customers to return to the store | Inactivity for a specified period | Inactive or dormant subscribers |
| Order confirmation emails | Confirm that the customer’s order has been received and is ready to ship | Placing an order | New or repeat buyers |
| Loyalty/reward programs | Encourage customers to participate in loyalty programs and reward them appropriately | Upon sign-up for a loyalty program or after certain number of purchases | Regular and loyal customers |
| Seasonal greetings | Send emails during holidays and special events to maximize sales | Popular holidays such as Christmas, New Year, and Easter | General subscribers |
| Back-in-stock alerts | Notify customers when previously unavailable items are back-in-stock | An out-of-stock email becomes available again | Customers who showed interest in those items |
| Cross sell/upsell emails | Suggest additional or upgrades to customers’ original purchase | After a purchase or during the checkout | Customers with recent purchases |
| Referral campaigns | Suggest friends and family to refer your brand to others | Post-purchase or as part of a rewards program | Existing customers willing to refer others |
You can mix and match different email campaigns during the various stages of scaling your e-commerce business. For example, you can send abandoned cart emails during the product optimization phase.
Regardless of the type of campaign you choose, it’s essential to follow email marketing best practices and avoid common pitfalls.
Best Practices for E-commerce Email Marketing
Following the guidelines in the table below will help you craft resonating e-commerce messages.
| Category | Best Practices |
|---|---|
| Subject line | ‣ Use personalization ‣ Keep it short and engaging ‣ Use emojis sparingly |
| Personalization | ‣ Address recipients by their name ‣ Recommend products based on purchase history ‣ Segment lists |
| Mobile optimization | ‣ Use responsive email design ‣ Optimize CTA buttons for touchscreens |
| Timing and frequency | ‣ Send emails at optimal times ‣ Avoid sending too frequently |
| Value proposition | ‣ Highlight benefits of products or services ‣ Include customer testimonials or social proof |
| Compliance | ‣ Provide a clear unsubscribe link ‣ Include business contact information ‣ Ensure email opt-ins are compliant with legal requirements |
Examples of E-commerce Email Marketing
Let’s check out how other businesses have handled their e-commerce emails.
1. Promotional Email from an E-commerce Business
Fiorucci’s promotional email is simple and uses high-quality images to capture recipient’s attention. The brand includes a discount code and immediately places the CTA beneath to increase conversions.
We also like how the brand uses consistent font styles and colors without overwhelming the readers’ eyes.
2. E-commerce Abandoned Cart Emails
Kizik uses strong email copywriting skills to encourage customers to get back to their carts. The brand uses unique product images to reignite interest in its customers. The email is also well-balanced with white space and has a good color combination.
3. Seasonal E-commerce Email Example
Rebel Rabbit targets students and the back to school season makes it the perfect time to promote their drinks. There’s complementary color tone and good use of product images. More importantly, the email tells a vivid story about the brand.
You can introduce similar campaigns and understand customers’ shift in preferences using email marketing psychology. But whatever email type you choose, ensure you maintain a high email deliverability rate.
There are different email marketing tools that can help you do that. We’ve listed the top ones below.
Email Marketing Tools to Scale your E-commerce Business
The table presents the top email marketing tools to help you scale your e-commerce business.
| Features and Functionality | Mailchimp | Brevo | ConvertKit | ActiveCampaign | Campaign Refinery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Target audience | E-commerce brands | Entrepreneurs to large businesses | Online creators (bloggers and YouTubers) | Scalable businesses | All business types |
| Key strength | Ease of use | Email, SMS, and chat communication | Creator marketing platform with optimization features | Centralized marketing | Advanced email deliverability |
| Ease of use | 8 | 8 | 9 | 8 | 10 |
| Email deliverability | 8 | 7 | 8 | 8 | 10 |
| Advanced automation | 8 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 10 |
| Campaign templates | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Segmentation | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pricing based on | Emails | Emails | Email subscribers | Contacts | Email volume |
| Real-time email editor | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Spam check tool | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automatic email list cleaning tool | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Mandatory domain authentication | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Engagement gamification | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Evergreen flash sale | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
Every ESP has its own pros and cons. If you’re looking to start small and grow your email list with transparent pricing, then Campaign Refinery is the choice.
Scale your E-commerce Business with Confidence Using Campaign Refinery
Campaign Refinery works on a credit system — clients can purchase as many credits as they want and use them to clean email lists, send emails, and perform other actions. This means, you only pay for what you use.
We only want the best for our clients and offer the highest email deliverability rates on the market. All clients are handpicked and undergo mandatory domain authentication, ensuring a responsible and safe email sender community.
Whether you’re a new business or an established e-commerce company, we work with you individually to craft your email marketing journey map. That’s why our team is available 24/7 to support your business goals.
Scale your e-commerce business with the best deliverability rates and premium tools!
