Grow your Business: The Ecommerce Flywheel Framework ™
November 19, 2020
November 19, 2020
“what truly set the big winners apart was their ability to turn initial success into a sustained flywheel, even if they started out behind the pioneers.” ― Jim Collins, Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
Flywheels are magical devices. They start with a few key inputs. Each one starts to feed the other and slowly but surely the wheel starts to turn a little bit over a year or two.
In eCommerce, most people give up in this phase because they don’t see instant results in months or quarters. They buy into the fallacy of get rich quick. But neither Apple or Rome was built in a day.
Often they don’t understand the key inputs to building a profitable online business which spans marketing, operations and finance driven by a remarkably different set of cultural values.
However, if these inputs are actively managed something amazing starts to happen: growth compounds as the wheel turns faster and faster. Momentum begins to take over doing the heavy lifting. It’s hard and requires a long view but when it happens it’s a truly magical event.
Some call this exponential growth but if you look at any exponential curve it looks flat for a very, very long time.
Those from marketing are often taught the 4P’s of marketing: Price, Place, Product, and Promotion. A relic since the 1960s, this framework fails to take into account the amazing datasets we have at our fingertips and the speed at which we can move off the data with today’s cutting-edge tools and artificial intelligence.
Think of the 4C’s as a solar system of sorts with the outer planets of the flywheel orbiting the sun which is Culture. Without the culture aligned, the flywheel simply never starts to spin automatically as things fly off into space.
I think we have a very good culture virtually everyplace in Berkshire. I hope it's everyplace. This is what we are looking for, and it's more a question of culture than controls. If you have a good culture, I think you can make the rules pretty simple. —Warren Buffett
Today’s leading eCommerce businesses require a fundamentally different culture built on speed and data which speaks to why so many traditional businesses can’t cross this digital divide (see Sears, K-Mart, JC Penney, etc). These new vanguard brands are the Warby Parkers and Airbnb’s who believe in testing ideas, sourcing great talent and treating technology as disposable guided by an obsession with delighting their customer in a digital experience by:
Building off the Culture value of customer obsession, eCommerce leaders track their customer base as a leading indicator for the value of the business and manage this as a key asset in the following ways:
Using the idea of personalization and empathy for customers, digital marketing campaigns are designed and automated for not only acquiring but also retaining only the best customers by:
With customer and campaigns humming, successful eComm businesses can then match their product catalog to customer needs in the following ways:
Get your culture aligned first. Don’t worry about growth hacking viral campaigns with influencers on a social platform. Or the latest plug-in for Shopify.
Those are distractions initially.
Assuming you have the cultural fundamentals listed above, next start with the following:
Bonus: Your CFO and board will love you if you can speak in finance terms and prove you understand how to build a business without lighting cash on fire.
Below, you can see a sample Google Data Studio dashboard with all of these pieces coming together to allow you to pull out the most valuable insights for making business decisions. We pulled Google merchant data for this example, but we invite you to connect your own Analytics account to see how this framework will best help you.
However, we built this dashboard to only represent a fraction of the possibilities surrounding data-driven digital marketing. The next step is using AI to turn out insights and strategies automatically. If you’re interested in learning more about how we do this, drop us a line and we’re happy to help.