How the Best Ecom Brands Turn 1 Order Into 10

0:00Out of every 10 customers you get this month, eight of them are never going to buy from you again. And that's not me being dramatic. There was a study earlier this year that looked at over 150,000 e-commerce customers and the repeat purchase rate came out at about 19%. So roughly 81% of people who buy

0:20from a brand just never come back ever. So it's just one order and then they're gone. And most ecom founders kind of know this on some level, but they never really said with it what it actually means for them because it means that you are renting customers. So you pay to get someone in, they buy once and then they disappear and then you pay again to get the next one. And every single year that gets more expensive, right? Because the acquisition costs have gone up something like 40 to 60% since 2023. Now compare that to e-commerce brands like Chewy. $1 billion a year in sales and something

0:59like 77% of that revenue comes from customers who already bought and they're barely even in the business of getting new customers at this point. They are in the business of the same customer buying over and over and over. And here's the part that I think most people get wrong. It's not because Chewy has a better product than you. It's not because they're better at ads, but it's because they built something specific into their business that most ecom brands never build at all. And it's honestly not that complicated once you see it. So, in this video, I'm going to show you what this is. But first, some quick context on why

1:37I care about this so much. So, I've spent the last seven years building the back end for over 150 e-commerce brands, and we've driven more than 300 million in revenue through it with my agency called Magicianly. And the pattern that I see over and over is a brand with a generally great product, decent ads, decent website, and a customer base that just quietly evaporates every single month. So, their business isn't broken, but they're just leaking money in the retention area, and they don't know how to fix it. So, let's get into it, and I will show you how. Okay, so first thing you need to understand, when we talk

2:16about turning one order into 10, everyone assumes the hard part is somewhere out at order six or seven, like there's some loyalty magic that kicks in later, but it's not. The hardest part is the order number two. So that first to second purchase is the single highest leverage number in your entire business and everything else compounds off it. Because if you think about it, someone who bought twice is dramatically more likely to buy a third time and someone who bought three times is basically a customer for life at this point. So the whole ladder rests on that

2:52first step at first to second purchase. So, if you can't get people from one to two, you're never getting anyone to 10 orders. So, you don't really have a loyalty problem, but you have a second order problem. And here's the stat that reframe this for me. So, half of all the second orders happen within just 30 days of the first one, and 75% of them happen within 90 days. And we see this all the time in the retention data of our clients across a bunch of niches. So think about that for a second. The window where you win or lose a customer for the next 5 years is basically the

3:31first month after they buy. And what are most brands doing in that first month? To be honest, nothing. Because their post-purchase experience is nothing more than just an order confirmation, uh a shipping notification, maybe a thank you email and some product information, and then they just go silent. Then like 3 months later, somebody noticed the customer went quiet and fires off a we miss you. Here's 50% off, which is way too late at that point because that

3:59customer already picked up someone else. So the whole game is that first 30 to 60 day window. That's where one order becomes 10 or it doesn't. And a lot of e-commerce brands don't realize this. All right. So the second thing, you can't just hope people come back to you. You need an actual reason built into the

4:19business for them to come back to you. And I like to call this the repeat purchase mechanic. And it looks totally different depending on what you sell. So if you sell something that gets used up, so things like supplements, coffee, skincare, uh pet food, whatever, your mechanic is subscription. And this is where Chewy is just the masterclass because they have their auto ship thing which isn't just some site feature buried in the account settings but it's their entire business because they give you 35% off your first order to get onto it and then they give you 5% ongoing to stay on it. And look what that's worth

4:58to them. So an auto ship customer spends around $820 a year while a regular customer spends $423. So, it's basically double from the same person just because they set up a recurring order instead of buying once. And that's the whole reason they can afford to be so aggressive with that first discount. So, they're not giving away 35% on a sale. They're buying a customer who's worth twice as much for the next 5 to 10 years. Now, of course, I hear you. If you don't sell a consumable, then subscriptions are off the table. And this is where I see ecom brands just give up and go, "Yeah,

5:39retention doesn't really apply to us." Well, listen up because it does. But you just need a different mechanic. So, for example, look at Away, the luggage brand. On paper, that's the worst possible retention category, right? Because someone buys a suitcase and then they're done for a decade. But their repeat purchase rate is around 42% which is higher than a lot of the supplement brands out there. And they did that by building an complete ecosystem around the suitcase. So products like packing cubes, toiletry bags, smaller weekenders, uh accessories, all the stuff that goes with the thing that they already bought. So the suitcase isn't the product, it's the starting point for

6:21a whole retention system. So what I'm trying to say with this is that if you sell durables, your mechanic is the ecosystem. So what's the natural next thing for them? What's the accessory, the refill, the upgrade, the complimentary item? And if you sell apparel or anything styled driven, your mechanic is newness. So, new drops, new colorways, new collections on a calendar on purpose because people don't come back to a store that looks identical to

6:49the one they bought from 6 weeks ago. Every single e-commerce brand can have a mechanic, but most eco brands just never sat down and decided what theirs is. real quick and then I'll get into the part that ties all of this together. So, I put a free email marketing course up on my website that goes way deeper into the systems behind it. So, the flows,

7:08the timing, the segmentation, all of it. It's completely free to download for you and there's no fluff in it. The link is in description below, so download it for free right now. Now, let's get back into it. Now, at this point, you might be like, "Okay, cool story, but why should I care about this right now?" Well, right now the average egress brand sits somewhere around the 17 to 25% repeat purchase rate. And of course, it varies a lot by category. So, consumables should be doing 30 to 45, beauty, uh 25 to 40, apparel 20 to 33. And if you sell durables or homeg goods, you're looking

7:48at more like 6 to 8 to 18%. So, first thing that you should do after watching this video, go find your number for your niche because those averages are not that interesting, of course. So, for example, a 22% repeat rate in apparel is fine, but a 23% repeat rate in supplements means something's badly broken. So, go look for that number first for your specific category, and then think about the impact for your business by improving this metric. So, let's say you're currently at a 25% repeat purchase rate and you're able to increase this to 30% in the next few months. That means you get a roughly a

8:2920% revenue lift over the next 12 months just out of your current customer base. So, that's pure profit for you that didn't require any extra ad spend. And now, think about how hard you would have to work to get a 20% lift out of your ad account. You would be testing creators for months and you would be fighting the rising ad cost the whole way because that lever gets harder every single year, let's be honest. And meanwhile, this lever gets easier the bigger you get because you've got more past customers to work with every single month once you proceed. And that's why I think this is so important for

9:06sustainable growth of your e-commerce business. Well, unfortunately, the vast majority of the e-commerce brands prefer to focus on paid ads rather than on retention. Okay, so you've got a mechanic. You know, the repeat purchase window is that 30 to 60 days. Now, how does the customer actually find out it's time to come back to you? Because this is the bid that gets skipped. So, your

9:28subscription option doesn't sell itself. Your accessory doesn't market itself. Your new drop doesn't announce itself. So something has to reach that customer at the right moment and put it in front of them and that something is email and SMS. And I want to be really clear about why this specifically because it's not just that email works send more email. It's that this is the only channel where you can control the timing and ads can't do this. You can retarget, sure, but you're paying full price every single time. And you can't reliably hit someone on day 24 after the purchase with a message about the exact product that

10:07they bought. And email and SMS, they can because you know exactly what they bought. You know when they bought it, you know roughly when they'll run out of it. So you can show up at the precise moment the customer is most likely to be ready for basically pennies on a channel that you actually own. So that's what a real back-end system looks like. A post-purchase flow that doesn't just confirm the order but gets them actually using the product because people who use the thing come back and people who shove it in a drawer don't. So, a cross-ell flow that lands in that exact 20 to 40

10:45day window when they're happy with what they bought and open to the next thing instead of 6 months later where they've already forgotten you. A replenishment message time to when the product generally runs out and not just some generic 30-day timer that fires whether it makes sense or not. And finally, a win back that triggers off real repurchase behavior for your product category and not just some lazy 90-day default that hits people when they're never going to buy again anyway. That's

11:13what email SMS marketing can do for you. So, email and SMS at the core plus WhatsApp and direct mail where they fit in. That's the timing engine. And it's why for most ecom brands, these retention channels grow from like 15 or 20% of revenue to 40% plus. Not because you send more emails, but because you finally showed up at the right time. And the thing I love about it is that every one of those messages is going to someone who already paid you. So, you've

11:41already covered the acquisition cost. And that revenue is about as close to pure margin as e-commerce gets. And by the way, I've got a whole separate video where I break down the post purchase flow in full detail, like the actual structure and the timing of each message because that's the piece doing most of the heavy lifting here. So, if you want the specifics on that one, go watch that video right after this and I'll make sure to put a link in the description below as well. But for now, let me give you the order to actually do this in because I walked through it back to

12:13front on purpose. So, I talked about email and SMS lost, but it's actually the first thing that you should fix, and it's not even close. Hear me out. So, your mechanic, the subscription, the ecosystem, the new product calendar, all of that takes months to build, obviously. So, product development, apps, inventory, the whole thing. But your back end can be rebuilt in weeks and it works on customers that you've already got right now sitting in your list doing absolutely nothing. So step number one is to fix the timing engine of your email and SMS channels. So the post purchase, the cross-ell, the replenishment, the win back, all of it

12:51timed to how people actually buy in your category. Then step two, once that's running, is to go build or sharpen your mechanic, whether that's a subscription or the ecosystem or the drop calendar. and step three only. Then start worrying about things like loyalty programs and points and all that kind of stuff because honestly those tend to add maybe 10 to 20% on top of a system that's already working and they can't rescue one that isn't working right now. So do it in that order and then you're compounding. If you do it backwards and you will spend a year building a subscription program that nobody even hears about. So always do it in the

13:29order that I just mentioned. And now here's the honest reality. Because most brands, they never get this build out. And not because like it's some secret thing, but you've just watched the whole thing, but because it takes someone actually sitting in the data, working out real repurchase time for your category, and then building and maintaining the flows and campaigns around it. And that's a job that keeps getting pushed to the next quarter. So if you want my team to build it for you, that's exactly what we do. So we work with seven, eight and nine figure e-commer brands and simply we just fix your email and SMS mesh channels so you

14:05can focus on the front end of your business. So if you want us to take a deep dive into your current retention channels, you can book a call via the first link in the description below. Now there's something underneath all of this that I didn't get into in this video because you can have the mechanic and the timing dialed in and still hit a wall at a certain size. And it's the wall that catches almost every ecom brand somewhere around the eight figures. It's not a retention problem exactly, but it's a bit bigger than that. And once you see it, you'll spot it in half of the ecom brands that you

14:38know. So, I broke the whole thing down in this video right here. So, go watch that one next. and I'll see you over