Online Business Owner: Podcast Recap With Scott Moran

Successful creators and digital business owners share many traits in common, two of them being:

• They put a specific emphasis on building Expansion Revenue
• They focus on their returning customers almost as much – if not more – than their new customers

These are some of the topics of conversation in Online Business Owner’s latest podcast episode, “How To Scale Through Expansion Revenue & The Importance of Repeat Customers with Scott Moran of Samcart.” 

SamCart co-founder Scott Moran sits down with host Ahmed Safwan to share his experience at SamCart and the lessons he’s learned from our most successful sellers along the way.

You can listen to the full episode here, or keep reading for a recap of our favorite moments.

Shared traits amongst SamCart’s most successful users

“We look at our top 25 [users] all the time,” Scott shares. “Our top seller did $17M in revenue last month. We’re talking about some very large businesses.” Over half of these businesses actually started out on SamCart and never left.

Scott says that the biggest things these top users understand is the value of simplicity. 

“The customers that started with us, from nothing, and have grown into these big businesses. They stuck with simplicity. They went from social media to an email list and brought people to a single sales page that shows what they’re selling and lets people buy it,” he says.

SamCart, from the beginning, has been the anti-funnel. While we’ve added new functionality and made features better, we’ve never strayed from that unique value prop of making it as easy as possible for creators to make more money.

What businesses need to do to scale their revenue

During the episode, Scott references a number of data points we recently discovered while putting together our 2023 Creator Profits Report.

He says the only formula for scaling revenue is to:

→ Have more customers

→ Spending more with each purchase

→ And buying more often (returning to buy)

Whether you’re scaling from 5-figures to 6-, 6-figures to 7-, and 7-figures to 8+ and more, the strategy is the same.

So how do you double-tap on the last two parts of that formula: get customers to spend more and return again and again?

Amazon really popularized the idea of adding more on to your order, through post-purchase Upsells and pre-purchase Order Bumps. These two opportunities for Expansion Revenue, as we call it, are the single most important lever businesses can pull to increase average order value, and thus bring in more revenue.

Expansion Revenue is the money your customers spend on top of their core purchase of whatever is it that you offer. Creators who do this increase their average order value by 125%, more than doubling the initial cost of a customer’s purchase.

“When you only have a handful of customers, getting each of them to spend more will change the course of your business forever,” says Scott.

The unsung importance of driving repeat business

Acquire, acquire, acquire – that’s what most creators do when they’re building and beginning to scale their business. They think that new customers = more money. 

We learned recently that the opposite is true, and Scott shares more about those findings.

“If I have 100 customers, about 12 of them will come back and buy again,” Scott shares. “But those 12 customers, on average, represent about 46% of total revenue. In your business, you have this small minority that is going to account for almost half your business. If you’re not thinking about repeat sales, you’re slashing your business in half.”

At SamCart, we call these repeat customers our ‘whales.’ By focusing on your whales, you’ll not only grow that massive part of your business, you’ll be able to scale back on expensive acquisition strategies like underperforming ads.

Learn the strategies of 8+ figure SamCart creators on this episode of Online Business Owner

This episode is ripe with data-backed strategies for both newer and established online businesses. It’s absolutely worth an hour of your time to listen and extract all of Scott’s and Ahmed’s wisdom.

Check out the full episode here.

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