Stop, drop and Shopify:

YOUR E-COMMERCE GROWTH STARTS HERE

Interview with Scott Cunningham, Founder of Social Lite and Co-founder of Merchant Mastery

During the pandemic, many retailers were forced into selling online as a necessity to survive. Some businesses setup their e-commerce for the very first time, while others who were already established with online stores, looked for growth opportunities. One thing is for certain, no matter what stage you are in with your e-commerce business, selling online is here to stay.

Scott Cunningham is the founder of Social Lite, a leading Shopify Partner agency that has helped dozens of Shopify stores around the globe scale past $1 million and beyond. The Social Lite team has managed more than $15 million in digital advertising spend for their clients over the past year alone, and they are certified Klaviyo Masters, driving 20-40 percent of all sales through email marketing. Scott is also a co-founder at Merchant Mastery, a training and coaching incubator for Shopify store owners that has helped over 300 Shopify merchants launch and grow their digital campaigns.

Merchant Mastery introduced their first online course in spring 2020 as a pay what you can program on how to build your Shopify store. After experiencing immediate demand for this type of educational offering, they built out a bigger curriculum that extends after an online store is built. 

“We want to make sure retailers can understand their customer segment, write copy for their website that is going to convert high, build out offer strategies, launch ads and build emails,” says Scott. “We created an 8 week course that’s 40 hours of content and helps businesses from beginning to end on those topics.” Retailers can enroll to become members with Merchant Mastery, access the self-guided training and participate in live coaching sessions every week to answer any questions and ensure merchants are getting the most out of the training. “We’re in everyone’s corner,” says Scott.

Once a Shopify site is up and running, it’s important to pair the product offering with the right marketing channels to attract customers. “If you’re a brick-and-mortar, you probably already have an existing customer base that you can use to drive traffic to your store,” explains Scott. “If you’re a brand-new start-up, selling direct to consumer, you might make the mistake of over investing in branding and inventory

before evaluating product market fit. First, you want to validate that you have something that people want to buy.”

Once you have the fundamentals right, the next step in your e-commerce journey is to start diversifying your platforms. “We’ve been doing more with Snapchat and Pinterest. We don’t want to be dependent on one platform,” says Scott. “Building your own e-mail list is essential. Facebook could have a logarithm that changes, and you lose thousands of dollars in one day. Make sure you are building your own community and your own lists.”

A marketing channel he says works well for new businesses is micro-influencers. Influencers with less than 1500 followers convert sales at a high rate because they have an actively engaged and authentic audience. Once you’ve done your product market fit and have some sales on your own, this is a good way to expand your efforts. “You always need some kind of leverage when approaching an influencer,” explains Scott. “You want to be able to say you’re a growing brand, give examples of how you’ve increased your network, sales numbers and provide positive feedback from customers.”

For independent brick-and-mortar retailers navigating the online world, Scott’s recommendation is to start by building a prototype of what the store is going to look like in five years. Start with selling your best sellers online. This will allow you to get comfortable with promoting your Shopify store to your e-mail list, learn the fulfillment process and address any issues with the operational part of the business. Once you have a team member in place to oversee the online sales and you are confident you can run the store smoothly, expand by introducing more SKUs and product categories.

Scott advises, “the true heart of e-commerce marketing is knowing what people are going to say yes to when you present your product to the world.” 