I’m an absolute idiot.

I have an ecommerce brand that I started at the very beginning of 2020 and have had great success every year since.

Covid helped A LOT with it gaining traction so it was profitable right out the gate. We hit almost $2-million in revenue in the first year alone.

But here’s where I made a huge mistake… I got lazy and complacent.

So much so that my only means of generating revenue and sales were through paid ads. And although my brand was able to stay profitable in the front end (we have low product costs and can scale without any major bottlenecks)… when Covid was finally declared over, we started seeing a MASSIVE decrease in profit even though our revenue was up due to rising ad costs.

See, the one thing I severely neglected (among other stuff), which is probably the most BASIC and FUNDAMENTAL thing for every business, was sending out promotional emails. In other words, I didn’t take advantage of the most valuable asset that my business has: my audience/customer base that I’ve already invested money in.

Yes, you read that right, I didn’t send out a SINGLE promotional email until this year. I was so content with the results I was getting from paid ads, I thought to myself, “Ehh, I’ll do emails later once I’ve grown my business more”.

But now email accounts for around 35% of my revenue, and we net 70% of the sales generated through these emails. I could operate at break even or at a loss in terms of acquisition, and our emails will more than make up for that. I’m basically just printing money at this point, and my open rate, click rate, and placed order rate are going up with each new campaign I send out.

There’s also nothing special about my emails. I literally just have my logo, a simple image with a promo code on it (made via a basic Canva template), and then about 4 - 5 lines of text talking about the promo and how they’ll be missing out if they don’t take advantage of it. That’s it. The area where I probably spend the most time is probably the subject line, but even that’s easy to do, just grab a swipe file of headlines and look for one that fits your brand, then plug your product in.

Of course, the money I “lost” is just an estimate based on my last year’s revenue, but still, just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach.

At the end of the day, success in ecommerce or in any industry, in my opinion, is really just about the fundamentals. You need to put in the groundwork by first creating or branding a product that fulfills a need/want in your niche, promote the hell out of it through paid ads/posts, and then cultivate a relationship with the audiences you’ve built through these channels.

Anyone who tells you otherwise or that there’s a secret sauce/formula to starting a successful business is just trying to take advantage of your naivety and make money off you.

But yeah, if there’s one takeaway from this post, please don’t make the same mistake I did and neglect promotional emails. I know if you’re just starting out it may seem like it’s not even worth it with a small or no audience, but if I could start over and do one thing different, it would be sending out emails at the very start. I can’t stress how important emails (and I would extend this and say social media content as well) are.