If you want to find success with your e-commerce business, take advice from an e-commerce expert, JD Crouse.

It's easy to hit a wall when you're trying to grow your business. How do you know if you're heading in the right direction and not setting yourself up for failure?

Growth comes from a good understanding of what your business is and who your audience is. As an e-commerce expert, Crouse knows exactly what it takes to start a business through Shopify and grow it exponentially. This is exactly what he did with his business, Bolder Band.

Bolder Band is a women’s headband company based in Colorado. Crouse's wife created a high-quality headband that stayed in place throughout your entire workout, and the product started taking off. Crouse joined his wife at the company in order to help with their marketing and branding efforts. With no previous experience in e-commerce, they worked on turning an idea for a great headband into a thriving online store. In about three years, their business went from being run out of their kitchen to being worth $6.5 million with the help of Crouse’s understanding of their customer base. Thanks to the basic principles and methods he used, Crouse knew how to respond to different types of customer behavior to keep people engaged, engage lost opportunities, and bring in new prospects. He figured out what was working best and used it to generate even more happy customers.

How did he do it? Along with a number of tools that helped him along the way, Crouse knew he had to gain a better understanding of what was driving his customers to buy. With a little help from our team, he analyzed his historical shopping data through the 80/20 principle and RFM segmentation to know where the smart opportunities were for his business to grow. He used our benchmarking reports to get an example of what opportunities, on average, were the best to target for the fashion industry. From there he was able to compare his own data and start growing his company.

Crouse is a Well Known E-commerce Expert Because He Pays Close Attention to His Customers’ Behavior

Part of the reason why Crouse is a well-known e-commerce expert is the impressive successes he has under his belt. In 2014, he gathered 7,200 new email leads in just four days by offering an irresistible promotion to prospects. Through the tool Justuno, Crouse created promotional offers like free gifts, coupon codes, or free shipping for their customers. The tool as a whole helped Crouse drive tens of thousands of new email leads just by offering a valuable deal.

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2014, Bolder Band ran a promotion that drove all their paid traffic through Facebook and Google AdWords to a landing page. The landing page then brought up a popup that let users know they could receive free shipping, three Bolder lip balms, and a surprise gift if they joined their mailing list. The promotion was a huge success, and in the four days it was running, Bolder Band gained thousands of new email subscribers to include in their marketing efforts.

Most notably in 2014, Bolder Band was one of the ten winners of the Shopify Build-a-Business competition. The win cemented Crouse as an e-commerce expert and a household name within the Shopify community.

The Shopify Build-a-Business competition is Shopify’s way of highlighting their online retailers by choosing ten winners in a variety of industries based on who can sell the most in a two-month time period. The total competition saw $121 million in sales. Fashion and accessories, Bolder Band's category, accounted for 42.6 percent. At the time they were only selling a $15 product, but they were able to gain so many customers because one, they had an awesome product that solved a problem, and two, they knew what it took to keep people engaged with their brand.

Both of these achievements were possible because of how well Crouse knew the Bolder Band audience. He knew what caused the best results and repeated it in order to find significant success. Crouse understood who his best customers were and intentionally chased down more of them by using the same methods that brought the first group in. As Bolder Band grew, his understanding turned into wisdom and he was able to continue to capitalize on what made Bolder Band great from the start. This led to lower acquisition costs and costs of retention while establishing a high profitability.

Take a page out of Crouse’s book and try gaining a better understanding of your customers as a way to grow your business. You might be surprised at what you find and what you’re able to do.