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- Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Software
- Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics For Dummies
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- Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Platforms
There’s no shortage of advice on growing eCommerce sales, but most of the advice is quite generic and, in many cases, outdated.
Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Software
In this post, I want to avoid the obvious and share some of the more advanced strategies that forward-thinking eCommerce businesses are using to gain a competitive advantage. While I don’t expect all of them to be relevant to everyone, I hope you’ll get at least a few good ideas to take away and experiment with.
So, let’s start off with one of the biggest emerging trends this year; mCommerce.
1. Go from mobile ready to mCommerce optimised
According to IBM, in the week around last Thanksgiving, 26% of all online sales referred by affiliates were made from mobile devices. Needless to say. we’re past the point of mobile commerce being an upcoming trend – it’s here to stay.
While having a responsive website is a good start, optimising for mobile commerce requires a more proactive approach to improving your website’s mobile user experience.
From using simple mobile payment processing to testing the design of your mobile checkout, mCommerce optimisation is an ongoing process that will surely pay off as mobile adoption rates continue to rise.
2. Setup post-purchase automation to upsell, collect feedback, and keep customers coming back
If you run an eCommerce website and haven’t adopted marketing automation, this might be one of the most valuable points you read in this post.
Marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign allow you to set up ‘sequences’ that can nurture, educate, and upsell to customers based on their actions and behaviour.
Let’s say, for example, you run an eCommerce website aimed at brides. If a customer bought some wedding invitations from your site, they could automatically be placed into a ‘pre-wedding’ sequence of emails that walk them through the wedding planning process, recommending products like bridal shower gifts and thank you cards along the way.
In fact, one wedding eCommerce site called Paper Style actually did this, raising their revenue by 330%.
The scope of what you can achieve with post-purchase automation is only limited by your imagination. At Venture Harbour, we use ActiveCampaign to drip feed coupons and trust-building content to our eCommerce leads, which significantly increased our conversion rates.
From sending a personalised email out to customers twelve months after their purchase, to cross-selling related products, this is by far one of the most powerful tactics you can adopt to grow your eCommerce business.
3. Use Facebook Exchange retargeting to reduce lost sales
Thanks to the level of segmentation, Facebook Advertising can be enormously effective for acquiring new customers and re-activating old ones.
For eCommerce sites specifically, Facebook Exchange is particularly effective in reducing shopping cart abandonment.
Facebook Exchange works by dropping a cookie on a user’s computer when they visit certain pages on your site. If a user adds a product to the shopping cart but doesn’t purchase, a cookie can be dropped on their computer, signalling Facebook to display an advert on their timeline encouraging them to complete their order.
In combination with standard Facebook Ads, this technique is extraordinarily powerful. In a study of $1.2M in eCommerce sales, Nanigans found that customers who entered FB Exchange remarketing pools after first viewing a standard Facebook ad purchased 89% more in sales revenue than those who entered FB Exchange remarketing pools from other channels, such as organically or through search.
4. Automate birthday, anniversary, and seasonal cash discounts
One of the simplest ways to boost customer loyalty and lifetime value in a personalised and automated way is to set up anniversary, birthday, and seasonal discount coupons.
Using a marketing automation tool you can set up sequences that send each customer a personalised message on their birthday, and at specific intervals after purchasing from your site.
In a study of 10,000 birthday and anniversary emails, Experian found that personalised birthday emails had almost five-times the transaction rate of standard bulk birthday mailings.
Ideally, these should be dollar-off coupons e.g. $10 off your next order.
In the same study as above, Experian found that when compared to other popular discounts, such as a %-off or free shipping coupon, dollar-off discounts generated the highest redemption rates and revenue per mailing.
5. Use long-form content marketing to boost SEO traffic, social engagement, and drive sales
As outlined in yesterday’s post, one of the tactics that we’ve experimented with extensively at Venture Harbour s long-form content marketing.
After testing a variety of formats, and content lengths, we found that producing highly visual 3,000-8,000 word guides was one of the most consistently high performing content mediums for increasing social engagement, search traffic, email subscribers, and revenue.
When created around specific product categories, eCommerce content marketing provides a great opportunity to acquire targeted traffic for the one-off investment in producing the content.
I’d argue that this is among one of the biggest opportunities for thousands of eCommerce businesses.
6. Plug the biggest gaps in your conversion funnel
Do you know where potential customers are dropping out on your website?
If you use Google Analytics conversion tracking or a tool like KISSmetrics, you should be able to see a visual representation of where the leaks in your website’s conversion funnel are.
With this information to hand, you can begin to research what the cause of these leaks. By surveying customers, commissioning user tests, and even watching a customer use your site, you should start to see ideas for improving the areas of your site that will translate into increases in conversions.
Once you have a set of ideas to test, you can use a tool like VWO or Optimizely to run a split test experiment. By repeating this process, you can systematically improve the user experience and increase the value of all other marketing activity by reducing the barriers for customers to give you money.
7. Expand into new territories
An often overlooked strategy for growing an online business is to translate the site and begin targeting customers in multiple countries.
While there are dedicated translation plugins and add-ons for most major eCommerce shopping platforms, it’s often best to hire specialised translation services in the countries you wish to expand into.
If you do decide to target new markets, be sure to also take into account the implications on SEO (e.g. geo-targeting URLs and using the Hreflang tag), as well as ensuring that your payment processor accepts payments from the country’s main currencies.
8. Focus 80% of effort on your best products
According to Pareto’s Law, it’s likely that 80% of your profits are derived from 20% of products. 3 tips for writing content that sells directly.
By focusing on the small number of products that disproportionately contribute towards your website’s success, you can achieve exponential growth.
Why? Because It’s typically easier to grow a product generating £100,000 / month to £200,000 / month than it is to get a £5,000 / month product to £10,000 / month. You’re better off focusing on the £100,000 improvement than the £5,000 improvement.
As a side note, I highly recommend reading The One Thing by Gary Keller, and Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Both books highlight the importance of focusing on the single most important thing that contributes to your growth at any one time.
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9. Offer the best affiliate program in your industry
Pareto’s Law applies to more than just what products you should focus on. It also applies to which products affiliates in your industry will promote.
In the majority of cases, 80% of affiliates in a given niche will promote the best / highest paying products and affiliate programs in that niche.
Zelda wind waker gamecube download. First of all, if you don’t have an affiliate program setup, it’s probably worth investigating. Not only do affiliates do a lot of your marketing for you, a good affiliate program acts like a moat around a castle. If all the affiliates in a niche are promoting your business, it makes it harder for competitors to gain market share from your business.
If you do have an affiliate program, the next question is – would you rush to promote it if you were an affiliate?
While you might not be in a position to compete with the 6-8% payouts offered by sites like Amazon, there might be other ways to sweeten the deal for your affiliates. The first opportunity is to have a better conversion rate than your competitors.
Most affiliates would rather promote a program that offered a 3% commission and had a 5% conversion rate, than a product offering a 5% commission and a 2% conversion rate. In fact, they’d be silly not to as the first program would generate them 33% more income.
Another technique is to run affiliate contests. Many companies give away iPhones, iPads, free holidays, and other gifts to their affiliates to keep them loyal.
10. Send an urgent specific discount to your customers
While the results of this campaign are unknown, I was impressed when I came across this email campaign sent out by Petflow.
By providing customers with a specific discount of $4.25 that was valid for only 24 hours, they gave existing customers a compelling reason to take action quickly. For a site like Petflow, where pet owners will always likely need something, I imagine this offer was incredibly successful.
Could you test a similar tactic for your website?
11. Use multichannel marketing to impress customers and stand out from the crowd
It’s said that conventional thinking leads to conventional results. If you want to stand out from the crowd, consider how you can appear where no one else does.
How could you use SMS messages or postcards to engage your customers, solve their problems, and increase their loyalty to your brand?
While there are numerous companies that will integrate with your CRM system to enable you to send personalised SMS and personalised messages to your customers, some automation tools like Ontraport are beginning to offer this as standard.
12. Turn your likes into leads with social contests
Running a contest on social media sites is one of the most rapid, affordable and scalable tactics I’ve ever come across for capturing email addresses and potential leads.
In a campaign that I ran for a client last year, I managed to collect 681 email addresses of potential leads, 75 of which signed up for their service for a total cost of $37.
If you have a large following on Facebook or Twitter, it might be worth using a social contest tool to turn some of your likes into paying customers.
13. Upgrade your eCommerce software
Sometimes you need to take one step back to take two steps forward.
If your eCommerce software is outdated or prevents you from taking advantage of powerful techniques like automation and multichannel marketing, it might be time to reconsider your backend software.
Last year, I made the decision to migrate an eCommerce site that I run in the music industry from our clunky bespoke software to one of the mainstream eCommerce software providers.
After a 2-month dip in sales, the site reached double the revenue it was previously turning over, simply due to the fact that it was easier for us to get more value out of our CRM, implement automation sequences, and make rapid split testing changes.
In Summary
At any point, your business is either stagnating or growing. To ensure that you’re is always growing, it’s important to understand what your customers want that you’re not offering them, and to experiment with technology that can improve the overall experience and process in which you do things.
I hope that this post has given you at least a few ideas to think about. If you have any other tactics worth sharing that you’ve found particularly useful, please share them in the comments below.
In ecommerce, data is everything. When you’re new to ecommerce, your time is usually spent on binary decisions and tasks that help you get closer to launching your business: You decide what products you want to sell, who your audience is and how you’re going to reach those people. You build a website, put the right tools in place and create processes for shipping and fulfillment.
In the early days, you'll focus on putting the building blocks in place to ensure that you can successfully launch your business. But to succeed beyond post-launch date, you'll need to step up your game and quickly evolve from business builder to data analyst. Then, once your online store is up and running, you'll need to make the kinds of strategic changes that help you boost revenue, reduce costs and acquire more customers.
Related: 5 Customer Engagement Metrics All Ecommerce Sellers Must Track
All the while you're doing this, there's also that data to stay ahead of. Knowing the analytics behind every aspect of your ecommerce business will help you make informed decisions about which areas to change and which to optimize, and when. To do so successfully, start with these four metrics:
1. Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Customer lifetime value, or LTV, is one of the most important metrics to track in ecommerce, but it's often overlooked for sexier metrics like ROAS (return on ad spend) and AOV (average order value).
LTV helps you understand how much profit you'll earn during the average customer lifespan. Knowing the lifetime value of each customer you acquire can help with forecasting, budgeting and marketing strategy. More specifically, it can help you understand how much money you can spend acquiring customers while still remaining profitable. It can further help inform decisions and strategies relating to customer retention and order frequency. Calculating LTV isn’t overly complicated. It just requires you to know a few key data points and be able to perform some simple calculations.
Shopify does a great job of breaking down the data and equations needed for calculating LTV, but the task essentially works like this: To determine LTV, you need to identify customer value by taking your average order value and multiplying it by your purchase frequency. From there, you multiply this number (customer value) by your average customer lifespan.
If that all sounds a bit too complicated for you, the good news is, there are a handful of reporting and analytics tools out there like Compass and OrderMetrics that will calculate and report on LTV for you. HubSpot also has an LTV calculator that can make finding this number a lot easier for you.
2. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics For Dummies
Another important metric to know is your customer acquisition cost, or CAC (sometimes referred to as CPA or cost per acquisition, especially in ad platforms). CAC helps you understand how much money you spend in order to acquire or convert new customers. Knowing your CAC is important because it can help you decide how much money you should be spending to acquire new customers each month.
Calculating CAC is fairly simple. Just divide the total costs associated with acquiring customers by the total number of new customers acquired over the specific time period when the money to acquire was spent. Examples of costs are paid social advertising, content creation, direct mail campaigns, etc.
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Related: 4 Metrics Enterprise Software Companies Should Be Tracking, But Aren't
Once you know your CAC, you can evaluate it with your LTV to understand how much you’re spending to acquire new customers vs. how much money you’ll make from them during their time as a customer of yours. If you run the numbers and find out you’re actually spending more than you’re forecasted to make (after you subtract your CoGS -- or cost of goods sold), you'll know you have a problem that needs to be addressed.
3. Page speed / load time
Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Tutorial
To succeed in ecommerce, you also need to pay close attention to page load time on your website. Page load time, or page speed, refers to the average number of seconds it takes for a page on your website to fully load for visitors. Because you don’t have the opportunity to meet your prospective customers in person in the same way that a traditional retail business would, your website is really your primary tool for creating the right first impression with people.
A slow website can negatively affect user experience, your ability to build trust and your likelihood to convert new visitors. It can also increase your bounce rate -- the percentage of visitors who arrive on your page and leave before taking any other action. A high bounce rate can negatively impact your ability to compete in search results on Google.
When it comes to improving page speed, what might seem like microscopic changes can yield big results. Your ability (or inability) to improve page speed by milliseconds can have a tangible and sometimes significant impact on conversions.
You can measure and track page speed in Google Analytics in the Behavior section of Reports. For tips on how to improve page speed and load time, read through the ideas presented in this article from Shopify.
4. Revenue by channel
Revenue by channel is another metric you should be tracking on a regular basis to fuel business growth. Knowing where your money is making the biggest impact can help inform your decisions about future marketing and growth strategies for your business. We refer to this as profit and marketing performance. If you know, for example, that your Facebook ads are resulting in more conversions and revenue than your direct mail campaigns, you might decide to shift more of your budget over to Facebook and dial back your direct mail efforts.
To understand revenue by channel, dig into the acquisition report in Google Analytics. This report will give you access to conversion rate and revenue data by channel. You can also get revenue and marketing performance data using tools like OrderMetrics, Glew and others.
Related: Vrooom! Why Website Speed Matters.
Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Platforms
Wrapping up
To build a profitable, sustainable ecommerce business, pay attention to the data. Having a firm understanding of ecommerce analytics will help you optimize current initiatives, shape future strategies and make informed decisions that can drive real growth for your business. And if you need a little more help here, check out this article by Michael Ugino which guides you through an optimal setup of Google Analytics for ecommerce.