If you're in ecommerce you’re in a numbers game, and it's my vision and mission to empower you to really understand this stuff so that you can leverage your data to make better decisions, help you make more money and be more profitable.
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Hello, hello and welcome to episode 14 of The Elevatory Podcast. Anna Jonak here, founder of The Elevatory. So where are we headed today, you might ask? Well, you'd have known from the title that we're here to talk about my favourite thing: numbers and data. But before you run away, please stop, hear me out because I have some gold for you today and I promise you that you're going to want to listen to this a couple of times and you're going to want a pen and a piece of paper.
You've definitely going to have heard me say this, and I'll keep repeating it until I'm blue in the face, but many people avoid their numbers. But if you're in ecommerce you’re in a numbers game, and it's my vision and mission to empower you to really understand this stuff so that you can leverage your data to make better decisions, help you make more money, be more profitable, you name it.
I'm going to do that today by walking you through some key metrics that you can start looking at right now with some performance benchmarks so that you can assess how your store is working on multiple levels, and to see where you might need to create some fixes. Not just where, but what's driving the issue in the first place.
The data I'm going to take you through now, you will generally be able to find in Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, whatever ecommerce platform you're on through their analytics, and you'll be wanting to use Google Analytics alongside.
Okay, so let's talk about bounce rates. Now, your benchmark here is to have a bounce rate of under 50%. Anything higher and what it means is that people are coming and leaving very quickly. So if you've got a 70% bounce rate, what it's saying is that 70% of people are coming and then leaving really quickly. Under 50% means that's a good thing. That means we've got half the people coming and staying.
Something else to look at is time on page. That means how long are people spending on your site generally, how many minutes? Under one minute means we've got a problem. The longer they stay on site means they're visiting more pages, they're clicking through and doing lots of things and really engaging. Talking of pages visited, again, under three pages, and we've got a problem. It means they're not really getting very far before they leave.
Then of course, we've got conversion rate. What does your conversion rate sit at currently? Our benchmark is to try and get to 2%, which means that 2% of people coming through make their way through to purchase.
If we've got bounce rate, time on page, pages visited and conversion rate issues, then you're going to want to look at one of three things. There's a good chance that one is the message. So people are getting there, and they just don't resonate with the brand, with the message or what you're articulating. Or you've just set up a shopfront, and you have no brand and no message, therefore people don't really know what to do. I've talked about this in previous episodes. You might have an audience problem, which means that you're just sending the wrong traffic, you've set up ads, or maybe you've got some SEO running, and you're just bringing in the wrong people. I've definitely seen that with some SEO.
I've got a client who has ballet flats. She’s done some fantastic SEO and bid on the ballet flats, but they bring in people and those pages have got an 80-90% about bounce rate. They're not there to buy - they're coming, they're reading, consuming, and they're out of there. So we're gonna see on those pages people are not staying to buy. Something else to consider is if people are leaving quickly or not spending much time on the site is that you could have a user experience problem. So what does that mean? That may well mean that basically the people are getting to the site, and the site's not loading very quickly. Or when they get to look at the product, they can't navigate through the product images, and they just get fed up and leave. I did this the other day, I was looking at some earrings. Saw them through I think it was Instagram, clicked, and then the website took forever to load. And I wasn't hanging around, I was out of there. So some things to think about.
Now, we've talked about this before in previous episodes, but a tool to help you understand how people are navigating around your site that you can install for free initially is Hot Jar. That will help you to see how people are engaging and might give you some insights into what people are doing. If they're not spending very long on the site, or they're getting stuck somewhere.
Moving on, I just want to talk about abandoned carts. Now your goal is to keep your abandoned cart rate low, but 69.57% is the average, which means that a lot of people are abandoning cart, it's expected. Now, we obviously want to keep that number to a minimum. The lower that we can have the abandoned cart rate means the more people are coming through, and they're following through. So when we have abandoned cart rate issues, then I would encourage you to be looking at how people are moving through the cart like is it easy? Is it intuitive? Do they have to jump through lots of hoops and have to fill out lots of stuff and it just gets frustrating? Is there information missing? They can't find shipping or FAQs very easily. That kind of stuff. Because again, you're jumping through lots of hoops and then you get to the end and the shipping is exorbitant. That might be why people are leaving. But again, just think about how people are going through the experience. So test your own check out or get someone else to check it and see what's going on there. See if you're missing a beat.
Average order value. Now, obviously, you want to have a higher average order value, which means that people are coming in and buying multiple things, not just one thing. So have a think here about what kind of offers and incentives you have in place. If right now most people are spending $60, and your free shipping in threshold is $60, consider putting your free shipping threshold up to $100. So that you see that people might put in that third item into a basket to kind of reach that cap. Additionally, you can look at incentives, maybe it's like buy two pairs of shoes and get 15% off. So again, people are working towards saving money, but they're more likely to multibuy. You could also have incentives of spend X to get Y. I've had these things come up where - crystals, love crystals! - buy this, spend an extra 'blah' and get this free crystal thrown in. And I'm going to be a stickler for that. Yes, please! Okay, so average order value, look at your benchmark, think about whether you're selling multiple things. If you're stuck just selling one or two, how can we incentivise people to buy more?
Now something else to look at is your return customer rate and average lifetime value. Now, if you've got a low customer return rate, which means you've only got a small percentage of people coming back and buying again, and your average lifetime value is low, which means that again, people in their lifetime with you there may be only spending once or twice, we've got a big problem. You would have heard me speak about this in a previous episode, where I was talking about the key to growing your business is ultimately in return customers and repeat purchases. So if you don't have a good return customer right here, what are you doing? What's going on with your customer retention strategy? Are you sending lots of regular emails and updates? Do you have customer retention flows or Winback flows in your automations? Are you using retargeted ads? Have you gone down the route of segmenting your email list? You know, are you offering special offers based on segments or purchase behaviour? Or interactions? Is your range enough? Are you serving your customers? All of these things are ideas for you to try and get to the bottom of why people aren't coming back and help you input a strategy so that you can increase that rate.
Something else to consider guys is email performance. Some benchmarks here are you'd love to have 10% of revenue coming in from automations and 20% of revenue coming in from your campaigns. So that's all to do with promotions, updates, new product launches. And if you've got an automation problem, in that you're just not making much money from your automations. Have you got all the right automations in place? What kind of automations do you have in place? Could you have more in place? This is a start point I would look at and then after that, I'd be looking at drilling down further into each automation and looking at their performance. Are people opening up, people clicking, are people purchasing? And if they're not, do we need to change up our subject lines to those emails? Do we need to change up the offers within those emails, the messaging, the hooks, the imagery, what people need to see? Likewise, if you're not getting a 20% of revenue from campaigns, it means you're probably not sending emails frequently enough or kind of getting back in people's faces.
Now, there's a few things I went through there. There's some base ones, but there's lots more data you could dive into. But these are some of the key metrics that we generally get started on with people. So they're really starting to understand what's going on with emails, what's going on with customer retention, what's going on with people when they're coming to the site, and they're engaging with it.
As I said, I would encourage you to listen to this episode again, and write those benchmarks down and go and have a look and see how you're performing. And then it's your opportunity to go and start working on a plan to increase or decrease your stats so that you can increase your sales and profit.
There is always a solution, there is always an answer, but the data will at least give you an insight into where you should be focusing your attention so that you can then go and fix those problems.
Of course, if you want help mining this data or you want us to look at it with you, or you want hands on help to support and fix all the problems that you have - you know where we are. You can book in for a chat anytime. You can head on over to theelevatory.com and book in a call. We really do get down deep and dirty into all things metrics, and financials and empowering you here. So if this is something that intrigues you, then go ahead book a call, we would love to hear from you.
We're currently recruiting into November and beyond now, all the way through till January because we have such a limited spaces because our work is genuinely really really hands on. Alright, that's it for me. I'm off to go and prep some more content and keep the recording going so that we can keep the content coming to you. Catch you soon.
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