Running an eCommerce site isn’t easy. In a sea of billions of websites, you need to make yours stick out enough to get a click. Even then, there’s a whole new challenge in turning that visitor into a customer without being able to talk to them directly like a traditional retail store can.
Fortunately, eCommerce businesses also offer exceptional insight into customer trends, conversions, marketing strategies, and more thanks to the metrics that can be collected through an online store. Visitors, where they come from, if they buy or not, and more information can be gathered using the metrics your site collects with just a few tools added on.
Below are 5 of the most important metrics for you to monitor as an eCommerce business owner. They’ll help you increase your sales, lower expenses, and overall become a more successful business.
Subscriber Lists
Maximizing your marketing & conversions is all about targeting the right people – those who are more likely to be customers. However, finding these leads can be difficult & expensive. The best way? Let them come to you.
Subscriber lists consist of email addresses of people who either have signed up with your business or who have shown interest in your industry. These lists can come from past customers, newsletters, promotional deals, list sellers, and more. This direct contact information allows you to send them offers in an attempt to turn them into a new or returning customer, and is one of the highest-converting marketing methods.
How to Grow It: You can grow your lists by offering some kind of promotion for those who sign up to be contacted by you. This can be signing up for a weekly newsletter that provides exclusive deals & discounts, offering a free trial or download for anyone signing up, and any other approach that gets someone’s contact information voluntarily.
Unique Visitors
Customers are the cornerstone of every eCommerce business, and if you’re not adding to your customer base, you’re losing out on growth. Through Google Analytics or many other analytics software, you can see the number of unique visitors you receive on your site. This metric can be used to determine if your marketing is reaching new users, or if you’re experiencing more repeat business than new buyers.
How to Grow It: Marketing is often the best way to recruit unique customers to your website. Whether you choose to use email marketing, pay-per-click ads, boost SEO, or social media marketing, each should contribute to reaching new customers. Just be sure you’re converting those customers – otherwise you’re throwing marketing dollars away.
Conversion Rate
If you’re like many eCommerce websites that use a marketing strategy to bring customers in, you probably get a lot of visitors – unique or returning. However, people visiting your site doesn’t earn you money (unless you use Google AdSense and receive a TON of traffic) so you need them to buy something to pay off the cost it took to get them there.
Your conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors you receive that buy something versus the total visitors you receive. For example, if you have 1,000 visitors in a day but only 5 buy something, that’s a low 0.5% conversion rate – almost definitely unsustainable unless you’re using low-cost marketing. Experts recommend at least 1% conversion rate to be sustainable (with more being better), so start focusing on CRO.
How to Grow It: Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of making your website better at converting visitors to users & customers through purchase or registration. By improving various aspects of your site, you can maximize the chances that someone will stay on the site rather than leaving after a few clicks. This way the money you spend on customer acquisition has a better chance of paying off.
While there are many different CRO strategies to implement on your site, one of the most important (and often forgotten) is the checkout system. After all, if you make it hard to take someone’s money, you may not get it! Handsome Checkout makes it easy to complete a sale by offering embeddable checkout forms on any page & creating a multi-product template to make it easy to see their cart. This cuts down on the time it takes to checkout, lowering the odds of them leaving your site before paying.
Average Order
As you hopefully know, selling more means you’ll make more profit in your store. While it’s common to just focus on getting more customers, it’s equally as important to maximize your existing sales by increasing your average order value. This means that people will spend more, improving your margins & increasing the amount you can spend to acquire new customers to grow.
How to Grow It: The best way to improve your average order is to implement upselling, order bumps, and other means of adding on more products to the average order. Buy One, Get One upsells, bundled product discounts, and “speeding up” upgrades (expedited processing, faster delivery, etc.) are just a few ways to add a few more bucks to your average order.
WooCommerce 1 Click Upsell extension makes it easy to add an upselling offer at checkout, convincing the buyer to accept your special offer & increasing the sale total. It’s easy to use, non-intrusive, and if they say no the worst that can happen is you just have your original sale. A win-win situation!
Keyword Rankings
Approximately 51% of all web traffic comes from organic search on Google & other search engines. Not only does appearing higher on the list increase your site’s visibility, but it also increases trustworthiness because you’ve earned your spot as a Google-recommended site. While pay-per-click ads can show up on top easily, they don’t have the staying power that good ol’ fashioned SEO (search engine optimization) offers for your eCommerce business.
Organic traffic is the least expensive marketing strategy to implement over time because it accumulates organically over time. Rather than paying for every visitor, you slowly build your site’s relevancy & trustworthiness until you have a reputation with a search engine that tells them you’re a good reference to link to.
How to Grow It: Your keyword rankings play a major role on whether or not you see organic traffic. To maximize your website’s chances of showing up highly ranked on search engines, you’ll want to:
- Optimize for Mobile
- Optimize Speed
- Include Lots of Relevant Content
- Receive Backlinks & Have Outgoing Authority Links
- Maintain a Blog
- … and more!
The easiest way to accomplish all this at once is to work with a SEO firm that can address your business’s specific needs to ensure you reach your SEO goals.
Wrap Up
When it comes to online business, metrics & numbers can be your best friend. From learning where your marketing dollars are best spent to choosing the best landing page to convert visitors to customers, the various metrics available through eCommerce websites give you more control than ever over the success of your business.
Be sure to focus on the 5 metrics we’ve listed above & use them to your advantage to gain a leg up on competition & increase your overall profitability.
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