How to Plan by Studying Your Data
Are you ready to take kick up your business growth efforts to the next level and watch your progress surprise you over the coming months? Great! Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to start with a baseline. That baseline is your “now,” where you are right now. Stop and look at where you’re at right now. Okay, so not literally. If you are in the bathroom or in bed, let’s not analyze that. Let’s take a look at where your business is at right now.
Data is our Driver
Business planning for future success is all about data. Data. Data. Data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. Then as you continuously watch that day, you can learn so much about your business and how it’s working. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now, your baseline. Don’t worry if you haven’t done this before, you can start now. It’s never too late to begin.
Keeping Track of the Data
Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information. Are you a traditionalist who loves smooth, colorful pens and beautiful moleskin notebooks? If so, then you might want to write it all down by hand in your fancy notebooks. Or are you a tech geek who has a very intimate relationship with your computer, then you may want to download up some fantastic spreadsheet app to do it digitally? I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it “geek out” further as I make it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture.
Traffic. Beep. Beep
Okay, so let’s start with traffic – To grow you need to expand your reach. This is probably the only place that you’ll want to see more traffic, unlike your drive to work where less is best. So, this means you really need to be getting more traffic but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more on your site. Some good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from. Now, if you want to dig even deeper, you can collect data using customer surveys, conducting interviews, or putting focus groups together. If you are developing a product, those are some great ways to collect data about your potential and current customers. Those are also great ways to get information about maintaining your current client base and keeping them happy, lifelong customers.
The World of Subscribers
Your next goal is to get new visitors to your site “hooked” and interested in your work so that they can then be added to your list. There are many ways we can do that but for now, let’s look at their data. Start tracking the total number of subscribers you have along with the dates that they came on board. Again, if you have not done this in the past, it’s okay. You can begin tracking these numbers now. Also, take a look at the conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages that you may have on your website. (You do have those on your website, right?) Those are the numbers that show how many people actually visited your site and filled in the form and clicked the submit button. Monitor your open rates for the emails that you sent out but also track the number of unsubscribes you get during that time as well. Your email marketing provider (i.e. MailChimp, Send In Blue, Get Response, etc) will often have that data for you. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers and their behaviors on your website.
Customers Welcome
Subscribers are great but customers are even better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and when they became customers. Then begin tracking how many purchases per day, week, and month are made. If you are a service provider, track when contracts are signed and for what service. Other good numbers to look at are the total lifetime value of your average customer, their repeat purchases, and refund rates. Also, depending on what you are selling, the age of your customer could also be important. As you begin your data-collecting journey, think about what other pieces of information you would like to have about your customer and consider adding those data points on your opt-in forms.
Show Me the Money
Finally, we need to take a look at the flow of money to and from your business. We hope to do more of the flow coming in rather than going out, right? Both are actually important but as a business, we do love the “flowing in” much better. Tracking income & expenses will help you as you look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. Basically, and quite obviously, you want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit and then also project income and expenses for the coming months. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis. Tracking basic income and expense sounds like such a basic thing to do when you are building a business, but you’d be surprised how many business owners fail to even glance at those basic numbers. If you fall I that category, take a deep breath and jump in. Even if you eventually have someone else doing this part for you, it’s important to know what is going on always.
Data-Driven Decisions
Yes, you can find most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart application, your email newsletter service provider, and your autoresponders, for example, but it’s important to have it all in one place. Having it all in one place will make it much easier to for you to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. It also makes it easier so that you actually do study the numbers. If it’s too difficult to bring it all together, we all tend to just not do it.
Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years. You can now call yourself a data-driven company!
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