10 Ecommerce Case Studies To 10X Your Traffic, Leads And Sales

Chris Von Wilpert

Last Updated Apr 19, 2019

For the past year, we’ve been documenting the marketing strategies behind some of the world’s most successful ecommerce companies, including:

• AppSumo: The ecommerce company that makes more revenue per employee than Facebook, Apple, and Google.

• Tony Robbins: The world’s #1 online celebrity product seller who has grown his website traffic to 1,000,000 visitors per month. 

• Supreme: The luxury ecommerce brand that uses limited supply to boost demand and sell out of product in minutes.

And more on Amazon, Shopify, HubSpot, Slack, Intercom, and MailChimp. 

What did we find? Success leaves clues. 

Take a peek inside the ten case studies we investigated... 

We revealed all the dirty little secrets behind how AppSumo built an audience of over 1,000,000 fans and went from making millions per year to millions per month (while eating tacos). 

One reader used tip #8 in the playbook to make $297 almost immediately.

Another reader stayed up till 5 am — his entrepreneurial heart couldn’t stop beating from all the valuable information he found inside.

Why were these entrepreneurs raving about our AppSumo growth study so much?

Here’s why...

• We documented the step-by-step marketing tactics AppSumo is using to make more revenue per employee than Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Slack. 

• You can’t make money online if you don’t know how to sell. We broke down the EXACT 500-word sales page AppSumo used to make over $250,000 in under 10 days (Tip #1)

• Facebook ads are getting expensive. We went over one ad campaign where AppSumo made $329,619 for a 29x ROI... and gave the strategy you can copy (Tip #8)

Plus tons more.

If you want to get access to all 10 tips I extracted while sleeping in the AppSumo office for five months…

Read The Full AppSumo Case Study

2. How Tony Robbins Generates 1,000,000 Website Visitors Per Month

Most people see a business celebrity like Tony Robbins and think, “I could never be that successful.”

WRONG. In this case study, we show you how.

We show you how Tony Robbins has grown his online store’s website traffic to over one million website visitors per month. Noah St. John has been in the personal development industry for 20 years, and it’s the best look into Tony’s marketing strategy he’s ever seen in his life.

Charles Henry knows what’s up. He read the Tony Robbins case study and thought it was on par with courses people are trying to sell.

Take a peek inside for yourself and you’ll find...

• How to use invisible mini-funnels to turn website visitors into customers (Tip #3) 

• A new three-part dynamic carousel retargeting ad Tony is using that you can use to show social proof before you pitch your product page (Tip #7)

• The content multiplier technique you can use to get more traffic for each piece of content you publish (Tip #10)

Copy these EXACT strategies (plus more) to grow your own website traffic. 

Read The Full Tony Robbins Case Study

If you run a luxury brand (or like to sell out of product fast), this is a must-read.

One day, I was talking to Noah aka “Chief Sumo” about writing a growth study on a company called Supreme.

When I brought it up, Noah was like... meh.

Here is how the conversation went down in the Sumo boardroom:

Noah: No one even knows who Supreme is dawg.

Me: It doesn't matter, none of our customers are playing at this level. Supreme's marketing tactics are hella unique and this is going to help so many marketers.

Noah: I don't know dude, why don't we do Amazon?

Me: I'll do Amazon next, but Supreme has to be first. People need to see how a high-end luxury streetwear brand makes millions of dollars in a day. No one knows this stuff.

Noah: Let's do it 

If you want to see what all the fuss about Supreme is, read this.

Bojan read it and said it was “the bomb.”

Supreme’s marketing is so good:

• They got Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and Drake to collab with them

• They had a “hoodie” selling for $25,000

• They sell out of a new product every week

Don't miss how Supreme turn their customers into millionaires by using bots in Tip #9.

Read The Full Supreme Case Study

If you have aspirations to build a billion dollar ecommerce empire, then this is your case study. There’s no ecommerce store on the internet making more sales than Amazon. 

As soon as Bill Widmer read it, he was amazed and started sharing it with all his ecommerce clients...

In case this is your first time using a computer (welcome!), here’s what makes Amazon awesome...

• They’re on track for $303 billion in sales 💰

• They get 2.37 billion website visitors every month 📈

• They set a Guinness World Record for the largest chicken wing eating competition 🍗

When Chief Sumo saw how Amazon built their billion-dollar empire, he started drooling all over his keyboard. 🤤

When Scott Burr saw it, his mind had been opened to a world he never knew existed.

We share all the juicy details below. 

Here are three of Amazon’s marketing tactics that opened Scott’s mind to a whole new world of ecommerce marketing possibilities:

• How to use a simple “Ecommerce Relevance-Raising” PPC strategy to automate your advertising (Tip #1)

• How to sell a loss-leader product on the front-end to make 4X more revenue on the back-end (Tip #2)

• How to add recurring revenue to your ecommerce business (Tip #7)

We didn’t actually reverse engineer Bezos’ chicken wing eating prowess, but we covered everything else you need to build your billion dollar empire.

Read The Full Amazon Case Study

In this case study, you can see behind-the-scenes of ecommerce behemoth Shopify. It was so good, even Tim Ferriss retweeted it.

Before you get too excited, let me tell you the backstory of how this case study came about. Five years ago I was at the Import/Export Fair in Guangzhou, China with my buddy Doug.

Doug was starting a clothing brand.

I asked Doug “how are you going to sell your clothing products.”

Doug said, “There’s this software called Shopify that hosts your whole website, you upload your products to it, and it takes all the payments for you.”

I thought to myself “that sounds like some cool software.”

Fast forward five years and Shopify is now an ecommerce behemoth generating $389,300,000 revenue, with:

• 377,500 paying customers

• 100.5 million Shopify store buyers

• $15.4 billion in product sold

Being a curious marketer, I wanted to see how Shopify did it.

So I reverse engineered EXACTLY what Shopify did, from their “sticky” free trial offer to their 15-minute “Just-In-Time” evergreen webinars.

The like, love and wow emojis weren’t enough for Samantha when she read it on Facebook. So she put in a request to Zuck for a fire emoji.

Konstantine read it and had his mind blown.

And Lucas couldn’t help himself; he had to steal a few ideas.

Check out what all the fuss is about for yourself.

Read Shopify’s Full Case Study

Do you spend a lot of time and money creating content, but nothing ever happens?

No traffic. No customer leads. No revenue growth. Nothing. 

Don’t worry. Tom was in a similar situation. Then he read our case study on HubSpot and got inspired to grow his business from the lessons he learned.

Amit saw how we reverse engineered the strategies HubSpot used to generate 21,500,000 website visitors per month, and couldn’t believe we were using tacos to bribe our sources to reveal their insider marketing secrets.

See how we did it, and steal HubSpot’s BEST content marketing weapons like…

• A free Facebook Messenger bot with 80% open rates that generates you leads on autopilot (Tip #13)

• Using a free software tool to surface your customers’ problems, then showing your product as the solution (Tip #11)

• The Instagram Explorer Algorithm growth hack that leverages “micro-influencers” to get you more customers (Tip #9)

Get behind-the-scenes access to HubSpot’s $271 million inbound lead generation machine.

Read HubSpot’s Full Case Study

You probably already know why Slack is so successful, right?

Viral word-of-mouth referral marketing... we all know the story. #boring

But do you know about...

• The smart “curiosity-gap” they used in a 60-second YouTube video to get over 15,000,000 views?

• The 3-step integration page SEO technique they mastered to get top page Google rankings?

• The reverse pricing model they use to jack-up their trial to paid conversion rate to 30%?

What about how they leveraged Twitter to quickly get the first 100,000 followers on their Medium publication?

When we showed HubSpot’s co-founder and CTO how Slack was doing these things, the article had already started making rounds within the HubSpot team.

If you want to see all the “juicy” Slack growth details we sent HubSpot’s co-founder, then you should make some time to read this Slack case study we wrote. Daren Cox has a full-time job, but he still managed to find three hours in-between working to read it (that’s because Daren is a BOSS who is dedicated to his craft!).

After PJ Pires read it, he had tears of joy streaming down his beardy face.

You don’t need to cry like PJ did, but you should at least check out the “Animals!” video in Tip #2.

Read Slack’s Full Case Study

What do Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) and Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) have in common?

They are both investors in Intercom.

While you’ve been eating tacos, they’ve been growing from $0 to $50 million in five years. To learn how they did it, we reverse engineered their EXACT strategy. 

Don’t worry about your taco addiction; you can read and eat your tacos. You’re even allowed to vote with your tacos like Antonio did after he read it.

Borrow Steal Intercom’s strategies to grow your business, or do what Dejan did and save it in a special folder with your other A+ growth studies from Sumo. 

Whatever you do, just don’t miss the one sentence in Tip #8 where Intercom uses Eugene Schwartz’s “Five Levels of Awareness” to differentiate their product from the competition.

When you know what level of awareness your customers are in, you will sell more product (and have more money for tacos).

Read Intercom’s Full Case Study

So you wanna go from 8 figures to 9 figures in revenue, huh?

Well, there’s a marketing playbook for that, and it’s filled with golden nuggets. Just ask Raul...

Before you pick up your shovel and start digging through the case study for gold though, let me ask you this question...

How much money is your business making per employee?

If you’re making more than $727,000 per employee (like MailChimp), then put your taco down (carefully), scroll back up to the top of this page and find the case study titled “AppSumo.”

If not... sit up, lean a little closer, and get ready to see EXACTLY how MailChimp generates $400,000,000 per year with just 550 employees.

Freddie (aka MailChimp’s mascot) and your friends at Sumo are going to show you ten new, creative marketing tactics you can steal from MailChimp to grow your business.

Muhammad’s read a lot of MailChimp articles, but there’s only ever been one that he’s read where the author “nailed it down.”

See how MailChimp nailed down a 19-second “MailKimp” viral ad in Tip #3.

Read MailChimp’s Full Case Study

10. How Sumo Doubled Blog Traffic From 100,000 To 200,000 Website Visitors In One Month

As a bonus for reading this far, I want to give you a free pdf copy of a case study I wrote with lessons I learned growing the Sumo.com blog from 100,000 to 200,000 website visitors in one month.

Patrick Whatman read it, and instantly added a new marketing tactic to his arsenal from the “bonus material” tip in the case study:

Victor Eduoh loved the ingenuity and creativity behind the strategy:

In addition to the case study, you will also get a Q&A I did with the HubSpot community answering questions on how we grow the Sumo.com website traffic, including:

• How many pieces of content we produce per week
• How to find the right keywords to go after
• How we come up with our content marketing goal
• How to determine your budget to hit the goal
• How I came up with Sumo's most successful content series
• Plus more

Learn a new, creative strategy to grow your website traffic.

Read Sumo’s Full Case Study

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