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5 ways small businesses can utilise e-commerce metrics

5 ways small businesses can utilise e-commerce metrics

Posted on September 24, 2020 by Photo Direct in Education with Comments Disabled Last Modified September 24, 2020

E-commerce isn’t just convenient for customers — the data attached to it can help guide business owners in decisions to grow. But e-commerce analytics can be confusing, if not downright daunting. Here’s how small businesses can capitalise on analytics to help their e-commerce grow.

Determine the most essential analytics to monitor your goals.

Small business owners can quickly become lost in all the data that’s possible to track with online sales. Besides total sales, determine which metrics are most essential for you to track for your business goals. For example, if your goal is to increase your social media presence, monitor the analytics that determine where the traffic from your sales are coming from to see if your extra social media efforts are paying off. Determine which analytics best help you choose next steps for your company, and pay the most attention to those. Find a happy medium between only looking at overall sales, and wasting time spent analysing every snippet of data.

Consider analytics from long term customers — and customers who don’t finalise the sale.

Bringing in new customers is great, but pay attention to the metrics that offer insight into returning customers. Look at statistics like the customer lifetime order value to see how much of your business is return customers. On the flip side, be sure to watch analytics on abandoned shopping carts and strategise ways to get customers to finish those sales.

Become familiar with the tools at your disposal.

What analytics tools are already built into your e-commerce platform? Take the time to really dig into all the different tools and features. You may find options like automated reports that can help you save time or even reach your sales goals. Don’t just consider the platform you are using, however, third-party platforms can often offer more analytical data than the e-commerce platform alone.

Ask the customers.

A computer can tell you how many sales you are getting, where those sales originate from, how often those customers are buying, and what they are buying. But there’s still a lot that a computer can’t tell you. As a small business owner, stay on top of customer complaints, feedback and reviews. Use customer feedback — or even a survey — right alongside e-commerce analytics to guide your next steps.

Find tools to make analytics effortless.

Following e-commerce analytics is important, but let the computer do (most) of that work for you. Use the automated tools that your e-commerce provider offers to make it easy to see your analytic data on a regular basis. Look for third-party tools that can help you decipher all the data to find what’s most essential to your business.

5 Tips for small businesses to master social media in 2020

5 Tips for small businesses to master social media in 2020

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Photo Direct in Marketing with Comments Disabled Last Modified September 9, 2020

Social media is no longer a maybe — using social networks to connect with your customers, for free, is an essential part of running a business in 2020. But, social media can be difficult to master and slow to get started. Choose one or two social networks to focus on where your target audience spends the most time. Then, to focus your efforts and build your business on social media, try these five ideas.

Set clear goals that are easy to measure.

What do you hope to accomplish on social media in 2020? Setting a goal helps focus your efforts and is essential to keeping your social media campaign on track. Once you have set your goal, however, take it one step further. Determine how you will measure that goal. List the social media metrics that you will monitor to determine how successful you are at achieving that goal, such as the follower count, engagement, or post reach.

Share content, not commercials.

Too often, businesses treat social media like one big commercial. Don’t. Instead, share posts that are useful to your followers. Share tips, advice, insight, inspiration, or even, if it’s on brand, humour. Posts on sales and promotions should be a small percentage of what is shared on your page. Sharing content from other pages is another way to build your page without loosing followers for sounding like a commercial.

Get creative with strategy.

There’s more than one way to create success on social media platforms. Brainstorm options to jump start your social media, and choose more than one strategy as you move forward in order to create a variety of content. Remember to treat social media as a conversation and engage with users, commenting on other posts and not just creating your own posts. Giveaways are another good strategy for growing your follower count, as well as creating hash tags.

Schedule posts.

Once you have a goal and strategy, start scheduling posts. Set aside one day a week or one day a month to schedule posts to your page. This both ensures that you have a regular stream of content and encourages more thought-out posts. Avoid scheduling too far in advance, or you won’t be able to use the information that you’ve learned from determine what posts are successful and which ones are not.

Use analytics to adjust your strategy.

No matter what network you use, it likely has some analytics that tell you how each post performs. Don’t neglect this data. Look at your most successful posts. What time of day were they shared? What content did you use? What format? Using analytics, you can recognise trends such as the best time of the day to share, or perhaps that asking a question increases the engagement on a post.