Karen Graham Of Evite: 5 Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful E-commerce Business

An Interview With Orlando Zayas

Define your brand and target audience. It is critical that you understand your potential customer base and that you zero in on who you want to serve. Dive into their demographics, habits, and interests. It is important to educate yourself on what brands resonate with them and why. Take this knowledge and create a look and feel for your brand that will resonate with your future customers.

As part of my series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Create A Highly Successful E-Commerce Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Graham.

Karen Graham serves as Vice President of Marketing and Brand at Evite. She leads marketing across branding and design as well as customer acquisition and engagement. Graham has over 20+ years of digital expertise that spans creative direction, brand, retention and performance marketing across fashion, beauty, and hospitality. Prior to Evite, she was Vice President of Marketing at Nordstrom for the off-price online and brick-and-mortar division, where she consistently grew the business year over year. The earlier years of her career were spent at the design collective, Commune. She then helped launch and grow HauteLook, a retail start-up which was acquired by Nordstrom.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thank you for having me! I love all things design and I started my career at a design and branding agency, working across fashion and beauty verticals. I loved the position because of the range of experience it offered in branding. My education was focused on graphic design and included a range of marketing courses. This set the stage for the early years of my career. From there I expanded into brand marketing and broadened to digital and growth marketing with the growth of e-commerce.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

Evite has been around for over two decades with a mission of bringing people together in real life to celebrate and to create lasting memories. Throughout the years there have been a lot of changes to keep up with technology and the way that we communicate and live. From the ability to text invitations to offering the first-ever cryptocurrency gifting suite, we continue to evolve our platform to make gathering easier and gifting more streamlined.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

The hardest challenge I’ve faced during my time at Evite was figuring out how best to pivot during the pandemic to prepare for what was to come. Evite is a business based on bringing people together and so we had to make sure that we closely monitored the customer mindset in our messaging and features. We chose to support virtual events and provide inspiration on how to connect, even if you couldn’t physically be together. We continued to create new, modern designs for the future. We also had to be strategic about how we wanted to utilize our marketing capabilities.

So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

We have always known that people would gather again as the pandemic receded. Humans are inherently social; being together in celebration and for support is something that we all need, to thrive in life. We continue to meet the increase in demand by releasing new and beautiful designs, as well as our ongoing improvements to the customer experience.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

A lesson I have learned throughout my career is when starting a new role, you should never assume that you understand the brand’s customer. When I joined Evite, our users were pandemic-fatigued, causing a decrease in virtual events. We continued to support this format as we knew there was value in continuing to provide customers with inspiration for online gatherings. Omicron caught everyone off guard at the beginning of the year and we all learned how unpredictable life can be through this experience. From a business perspective, make sure that you always have a solid financial foundation to prepare for unforeseen events.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Over the last two decades, Evite has released thousands of designs and helped millions of people celebrate every type of occasion. Our users have fond memories of the role we have played in their celebrations from invitation creation to party inspiration. As well, Evite continues to be the most innovative in the digital card and invitation space by offering online polling integration and photo sharing, as well as an array of gifting options including gift cards and bitcoin gifting. We help people celebrate all of life’s special moments from a pet’s birthday to a college graduation.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

My biggest tip would be to focus on the joyful aspects of work. This is different for everyone but if you can focus on the positive aspects including why you accepted the job to begin with, the rest follows. It is also important to be dialed into your needs to create balance. Make sure to vocalize these concerns early on. People are afraid to speak up when they need help, but once you do, you’ll be surprised at the support offered.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

In my early years, I had a creative director who really encouraged the most creative “out-there” ideas and encouraged pushing boundaries, even if we might need to reel it in later to make the work more commercially viable or to please a client. It made the process of creating so joyful. I’ve also learned from a founder of a previous company, to just never give up. While many of us dwell on failures and can find it difficult to quickly move on from those experiences — this person did not skip a beat and moved forward instantly, with no regrets. The idea of “failing forward” is a concept that I learned to embrace — no one has a perfect life or perfect career. You just need to learn from experiences whether good or bad and keep going.

Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. The Pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that eCommerce businesses are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the Pandemic?

Evite has always been a digital brand, which made our core utility relevant during the pandemic. As people transitioned to online baby showers and holiday gatherings our offering made it easy for users to celebrate with an online greeting and a digital gift card. In late 2021, we launched crypto gifting in partnership with Ember Fund. We will continue to grow and innovate with the goal of bringing people together virtually and physically to celebrate together while offering ease and innovation through our gifting options.

Amazon, and even Walmart are going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

You want to find a way to set yourself apart that isn’t just based on the most competitive pricing or highest quality product. While both things are incredibly important, they are both a race that only a few can win in either direction. Instead, find a process to connect with your customers through your brand story; whether it is about the why the manufacturing makes the product competitive or how you are giving back to the community you want to weave those moments into the fabric of your brand. The companies that connect most deeply with consumers are the ones that people can align with beyond the core utility of the products themselves.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start an eCommerce business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Be a student of your customers. If you’re lucky enough to have a viable, growing business, then reward those who have gotten you there by learning all about them and striving to best serve their ongoing needs. What makes them purchase your products? What styles or designs are they choosing over others, and why? What features would they most like to see in the future? Survey them, do user-testing, see their behavior in social media, read reviews — or better yet — answer the phones and emails. Great customer acquisition will follow excellent customer retention.

In your experience, which aspect of running an eCommerce brand tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?

For any digital business, the customer experience is of paramount importance and should never be underestimated as a key factor in building trust. There is always a temptation to push out technology or design because it gets the functional job done, but exceptional design and usability can catapult an ecommerce company leaps ahead of the competition.

Can you share a few examples of tools or software that you think can dramatically empower emerging eCommerce brands to be more effective and more successful?

I’m really excited about the world of cryptocurrency and what this means for how we invest and pay for goods and services today and in the future. Evite was first to market with the ability to gift cryptocurrency directly from our platform. As this becomes a more pervasive way to invest and to gift, we plan on continuing to be at the forefront of crypto. While this is still a new concept for many brands — getting ahead of offering crypto as a payment option might be one way to stay ahead of the curve.

As you know, “conversion” means to convert a visit into a sale. In your experience what are the best strategies an eCommerce business should use to increase conversion rates?

Study the conversion funnel on-platform on an ongoing basis. Make sure to always test out every hypothesis within each step of the funnel. Very small changes in design, placement or language can make a huge difference in improving conversion rate.

Of course, the main way to increase conversion rates is to create a trusted and beloved brand. Can you share a few ways that an eCommerce business can earn a reputation as a trusted and beloved brand?

Being a trusted and beloved business starts with offering a consistent experience from the on-platform flow to all your marketing and brand touchpoints, through to customer service. What does your company promise your customers with every interaction? Once you have the core promise established, do your best to deliver on that every single time.

One of the main benefits of shopping online is the ability to read reviews. Consumers love it! While good reviews are of course positive for a brand, poor reviews can be very damaging. In your experience what are a few things a brand should do to properly and effectively respond to poor reviews? How about other unfair things said online about a brand?

I’m a huge fan of product reviews and I think this really helps the consumers to understand what they are buying while offering a sense of the brand quality. Reviews can also help a brand get noticed, lead to more sales, and inform their business/product decisions. When they are negative, the only way to handle that is to take it in stride and to quantitatively evaluate whether there is truth to the feedback and take actions to remedy it, if so. With each reviewer site, you can always try to take steps to respond and/or dispute the review if you disagree. While time-consuming, this might be worth it to just let potential customers know that you are engaged and have a thoughtful response.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful e-commerce business? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Start by doing the research and understanding the market opportunity. It is important to make sure that you understand the demand for your product. Once you have this knowledge you can start interviewing people, looking at all the data available to you, and diving into the competitors in the space.

2. You will want to develop both a great product and business plan. If you haven’t already, create the best product you can based on your research. Your business plan should clearly outline your goals and how you’ll stand out from the competition.

3. Define your brand and target audience. It is critical that you understand your potential customer base and that you zero in on who you want to serve. Dive into their demographics, habits, and interests. It is important to educate yourself on what brands resonate with them and why. Take this knowledge and create a look and feel for your brand that will resonate with your future customers.

4. It is key to establish a marketing plan. We all would love an unlimited budget, but every business will face constraints — especially at the start. Based on your research, determine where your marketing dollars will be best spent. The most performative channel can be vary widely depending on your business. Take the time to test out marketing ideas on a smaller budget. It is important that you make sure you have your measurement in place ahead of time.

5. Always ensure that you have a plan for your supply chain and logistics to support growth. The most exciting part of building a business is when you start to see things working! Inevitably, everyone in this position will experience challenges with supply chain and fulfillment. This is a great problem to have, but it is key to plan for some growth ahead of time. In the case of Evite, we focus on our digital infrastructure and building technology that supports high traffic and users. Evite is built on an incredibly strong and scalable foundation that manages over 100M visitors and billions of emails and text messages, annually.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would love to provide guidance or mentorship to women working in creative and tech as they start their careers. Effective mentoring relationships help junior employees develop leadership skills, increase self-confidence, improve emotional intelligence, and navigate career advancement. Mentoring can also break down barriers, allowing for open discussions. As our company grows, I hope to build a mentorship network that allows women to connect with executives who can guide them through the skills and connections they’ll need to advance in their careers.

How can our readers further follow you online?

You can connect with me on LinkedIn, and follow Evite on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!