Cat Evolution: ecommerce growth across acquisition and retention

The business and its starting constraint

The store was not broken. It already had an efficient advertising engine, and that was the point. When a business like that stops growing, spending more in the same place usually buys less each time. The constraint was not how much they spent. It was how many ways the business had to win and keep a customer.

If this sounds familiar, the general version of the problem is in why ecommerce sales plateau.

The acquisition and retention work

Rather than raising spend on one channel, we fed the existing engine from several directions at once: paid acquisition, retention through email, and organic.

• Paid acquisition.

  Campaigns kept pointed at buyers the business could afford, rather than at volume for its own sake.

• Retention.

  Email flows and campaigns built so first-time buyers had a reason and a prompt to come back. The general approach is in how to get more customers to buy again and our email marketing work.

• Organic.

  Content working alongside paid, so the business was not relying on a single source of new customers.

Results, timeframe and what the metric means

• 2.09× return on our fee in year one
• 20.8× return on our fee in year five

These two figures come from the same client and the same method, five years apart. "Return on our fee" compares a result for the business with what the business paid us. Before this page is published, the exact definition needs to be stated here: which revenue or profit figure is the numerator, over what period, and whether it is attributed or store-wide.

What this case can and cannot tell another founder

• It shows patience compounding.

  The gap between year one and year five is the story. Most of the value arrived late.

• It is not a normal or expected return.

  One client's result over five years is not a forecast for another business, and the year-one figure should not be read as a promise either.

• It started from a working engine.

  A store whose customers already cost more than they are worth would need different work first. See the Apothecary by Justin case for that situation.

The summary on our client results page stays as it is. If your store has an efficient engine and a flat line, the next step is usually the Growth Program, after a Sprint. What SSO does explains how the two fit together.