How To Analyze Sales Data To Unlock More Revenue Online

We live in a world driven by data analytics—namely, sales data analysis.  That leads us down a neverending road of figuring out how to analyze sales data, analytics, statistics, and numbers.   It is a channelized interplay of all this that we can see the things placed in the way they are around us.

This whole idea of sales data analytics, data mining, and data science has completely captivated business and education in the last 12 months...  So much so that I see info products and degree programs popping up all over the place around this idea of 'data.'

Don’t believe it?

Well, why do they place the items in the way they are placed in a grocery store?

They have studied and found a particular pattern that attracts maximum attention. Hence, they have kept it like that. The same goes for the advertisements we see on our social media. Because of the data or the so-called cookies these systems use, we see those ads floating around on our computer screens.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this post, we will discuss the countless ways businesses can utilize data analytics to create a better experience and ultimately improve their sales. So, let us begin...

And to kick it off, one of my favorite quotes:

“Data by itself is useless. Data is only useful if you apply it.” Todd Park

1. How To Analyze Sales Data And Market Data

As a business, you want to generate as much traffic for your website as possible to convert them. You employ countless strategies – social media marketing, search engine optimization, paid marketing, and whatnot.

At the most basic level, you want to know how to improve sales with data...

What works and what not? It's easy to get lost in vast amounts of seemingly meaningless numbers.

Only quantifying and analyzing data can help you determine what works, which is why we built the Axis's Advanced Analytics engine... To get a complete picture of what works. What is driving sales? Where should you be investing your marketing resources? There’s even a free 3-part video series that’ll walk you through filling the gaps in your metrics.

With the power to increase sales analytics, you can eventually learn how to analyze sales data, driving the best numbers to your website.

Once you have those numbers, you can quickly analyze the sales data and focus more effort in that direction rather than continuing with the hit-and-trial streak.

2. Targeted Marketing Using Data Analytics

Your efforts are going to waste unless you know your target. It is data that helps your product to target.

Suppose you have project management software for teams. And, you intend to sell it in the market.

Which audience should you target? This becomes a big question. Running a pilot study, gathering the data, and then studying the results of this test can help you get a clear picture of your most influential audience.

So, you can plan the marketing efforts targeting that particular audience and kill it in the market!

That’s how powerful data analytics is when it comes to driving sales!

3. Predictive Analysis: How Analytics Can Improve Business

Your ultimate target is to reach the customers and sell your product. But when should you get them?

What are the best methods and the best time to get in touch with them? This can be achieved with data-driven predictive analysis once you discover how to analyze sales data effectively...

If you have a business that has been running for a long time, gathering past data to study customer behavior and understanding the results of interaction with them can be used to predict customer behavior.

Based on these predictions, you can eventually be more specific in your efforts and hit the bull’s eye with every marketing campaign to ultimately get more conversions!

4. Drive Down Costs With Data Analytics

As combined results of all the factors mentioned above, you can be sure of one thing – running more efficient marketing campaigns.

This means that you can be more specific when dealing with customers, create more targeted campaigns, and hence require less effort to develop and implement.

The ultimate result would be – low costs and better ROI - leading to an increase.

And this is the ultimate goal of every business. Isn’t it?

Bringing down the expenses and getting the maximum out of the investment you put in creates a successful business. With the help of data analytics, you can quickly achieve this goal without facing any trouble.

Inside our Coaching Accelerator Toolkit, there are LOTS of free training materials to help you understand and dig into analytics:

• Learn how to analyze sales data
• Start effectively tracking marketing data
• Find out how you decide what costs you should cut and
• Get to the profitable areas of your business that are worth pursuing.

5. Build Better Products With Data

A business must continue to evolve to remain a thriving force in the industry. But how does a company grow?

The answer is constantly building new products, better services, and whatnot.

Now, this is where data analytics can play a significant role.

Data analytics can help you understand market trends. What are the customers drifting towards? What are they attracted to in the current market scenario? And what’s the future going to be?

Answers to all these questions lie in your numbers, making learning how to analyze sales data the most important question...

Once you have those numbers and find the answer to these questions, you can head towards developing a product that already has a high chance of succeeding in the market.  So, you are in a win-win situation!

6. Better MRR Because Of Data Analytics

MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue for those who are not into sales.

It is the number of customers that come back every month to pay for your product or service.

With the power of data, you can efficiently study customer behavior, build targeted campaigns, and effortlessly attract those customers who have invested in your business.

So, you can quickly get recurring customers by targeting your efforts in that direction. As the numbers suggest, it costs five times more money to acquire a new customer than retaining one.

And data analytics can help you figure out ways to keep that returning customer number high.

What's Next?

Remember those words by Mark Twain, “Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you will do with it before you collect it.”

And today’s businesses have found the hidden power of data. They know what they will do with it and invest considerable sums in data and predictive analytics.

If you, too, want to learn how to analyze sales data and take your business to newer heights of success, it is high time you find the right source for gathering data and then invest in analytics.

The future lies in numbers and predictive analysis. And you would not want your business to be left behind in the market just because you did not want to invest in gathering those numbers. Would you?

So, what are you waiting for? Plan your way out, and see what strategy you need to implement to get the most out of data analytics for your business.

If all this data is Greek to you...  If you're a big-picture visionary and would rather claw your eyes out than spend a second looking at graphs...  Click the button below to learn more about what we do, and then book a free call!

Video Transcript:

They have no clue whether it's getting 2000 visitors a day or 20 visitors a day. That's terrible because if you know how much traffic is coming to your website, there are things you can do to influence that traffic. You can move them into sales funnels. You can do things like exit pops, put banners on your website, and serve advertising to start making money.

Hey, this is Jason Drohn. Today, I want to discuss how businesses use analytics to improve sales, website optimization, and conversions. It is how to make more money with the traffic to your site and the sales material that is usually already there. So a quote I love, "Data analytics by itself is useless. Data is only useful if you apply it," which is true. So, first of all, if you do not have an analytics program that you are using, you need to install something on your website immediately.

Stop this video, go, and install Google Analytics. And if you can't figure it out, figure it out because it is easy. Log in with your Gmail username and your Google account username, go to analytics.google.com, and then start your account. Then, it will ask you what website you want to track.

And do you want to track websites, apps, whatever? You want to follow a website, and your website is your URL. Then, there is a multitude of plugins. For WordPress, you can install the code directly to your site. It would help if you started tracking data because here's the thing. Your data analytics is lost. Every day, you are not following. So, if your analytics code is installed today, but you don't plan on using that data at any point in the next month, it doesn't matter. Because when you log in in a month, in two months, in three months, in six months, you still have all that Data you can comb through. But, if you don't ever take the time to install it, then that data is gone. You have no idea how many visitors your website is getting. There's a reason I'm harping on this.

So many of our clients who come to us have no idea how much traffic their website is getting. So whether it's getting 2000 visitors a day or 20 visitors a day, they have no clue. That's terrible because if you know how much traffic is coming to your website, there are things you can do to influence that traffic. You can move them into sales funnels, do something like exit pops, put banners on your website, and serve advertising to start making money, but you need to know how much traffic is coming to your website. So, now that we have that out in the open, how do businesses use data analytics? I have been digging through website data for the last 13 to 14 years, trying to understand the story that the data is trying to tell us.

And it's not just my websites or my traffic; all our clients, too. So, I've gotten pretty good at figuring out what data analytics means. There are things that I'm always looking for. Of course, revenue, number of units sold, number of leads in, all of that stuff is super important. That's also a given. I mean, if you're looking to do business online and you aren't tracking sales or aren't tracking the number of units sold, there's a problem with that. It's what you need to do. But some things influence those kinds of critical metrics, leads, and sales. Those things affecting the metrics are website visitors. They are keyword phrases that bring in new traffic. They are ad source, basic UTM variable stuff, so which ad is sending the sale? Lots of things that aren't ... If you're looking at traffic, you're looking at your sales and your leads and then downline; many things influence those sales and leads.

So, what are those things? Because if you can optimize those, then you get more sales. A great example is a sales funnel. If you have a thousand people who are hitting the home page of your site and right up top, there is a hero box. A hero box, right up top, with an image, a headline, and a button. It says ... I don't know, like even on Done For You ... "We Accelerate Your Growth" or "We Accelerate Growth". So, there's "We Accelerate Growth" and a little sub-headline and a button. And, let's say a thousand people hit the website, and a hundred of them hit that button, and then they go off into some sales funnel. So, the sales funnel, in our case right now, is a survey. It's just something we're testing.

So, they go down in the survey. Now, what if we changed that headline to be, let's say, "Make Money Fall From the Sky"? Let's say. Make money fall from the sky," so they hit the homepage, Done For You, "Make Money Fall From the Sky," then they hit the button, sending them to the same sales funnel, but we get 200 clicks. It's 100% more, or twice the amount of traffic hitting that button and then going down the sales funnel for that second headline. Now, that second headline isn't something we want on our website, but it illustrates the point. Whenever you can unblock a gateway, whenever you can unclog a gateway so that more people are flowing through it, then you're knocking down the barriers through the rest of your sales funnel.

So, if you get twice as many people who hit a landing page, you'll have twice as many people ... All things remain even ... You have twice as many people who will opt-in for that lead and then move into your email list. So, there are many different ways that data analytics can be used there. When looking at sales funnel metrics, what are the five steps of the funnel? And then, how many people hit each step, and is there anything that we can do to unblock that pathway? So, an example might be changing the -landing page headline and splitting it into three or four different headlines. It might be changing our button color so that we're optimizing the button. I mean, you go from green to red to black. You'll find a button color that'll give you a 12% boost in the conversion of your order. I know it's wild because it's just a color, but it always matters.

Order form design, sales page design, sales copy, all of these things can be optimized, and you're going to be looking at your data analytics to figure out what needs to be optimized and what needs to happen with it. So, just some fundamental parameters there. But, some of the things that I'm looking for ... We started with Google Analytics ... Some of the stuff that we looked for in Google Analytics, I'm looking at page views. What pages are getting an uncommon amount of traffic, and then what is happening on those pages? For instance, we have 400 blog posts. So, what are the 20 or 30 blog posts getting most of our traffic, and how were the keyword phrases influencing that traffic?

For example, our website is a sales funnel page. I think we're ranked for 170 keyword phrases on our sales funnel page and our sales funnel offer. Now, those 170 keyword phrases, all with some derivative of the sales funnel, are ranging ... Some are on the first page, and some are on page 10 in Google. A lot of them are on page five and page six. We're getting quite a bit of traffic searching from sales funnels, but we want to move as many of those page four and page five keyword phrases up closer to page one and page two and then move the 10s to page five. So, we're constantly pushing, trying to increase those keyword phrases so we can continue getting sales to funnel traffic and rank for more keyword phrases that then send us free traffic.

So, that's one thing I'm looking for: the pages and the keyword phrases sending us traffic. Another item I'm looking for is paid traffic campaigns, in which ads send an uncommon amount of sales or call signups or whatever we're looking for. I'm also looking for all this stuff in the client's campaigns. I'm always looking for the data that says the small things we're doing that make the most drastic difference. It might be a video of you targeting one particular group or interest base inside Facebook. And then, because of the language in that video, they are reacting to the landing page better, so they're opting in on the landing page and moving through the sales funnel faster.

That's all a data analytics play because, in data, you can see the UTM variable, you can see what ad this person came in on, you can see what the conversion rate on the landing page is, and you can see what the conversion rate on the sales video is. And ultimately, you can track how long it takes in most CRMs. You can track how long it took somebody to click the ad to purchase. There's a buyer lifecycle cycle report in some of the more advanced CRMs. So, you know that that video gets you better conversion and drastically reduces the customer life cycle, which is fantastic. Do you know what I mean? So the most significant thing, though, is it is so easy to get lost in data. So easy.

So, if you're not a data and analytics junkie like me, pick a couple of things that you're excited about. Pick leads, sales, and video view minutes, let's say. Those are the three things you watch. There's lots of dashboard-building software out there. I use an excellent tool called Cyfe, C-Y-F-E. You can build a nice little dashboard spread to check on it. I check on it once a day to see what my trending analytics are. But it keeps me good on the critical numbers to me now. Every once in a while, I'll take a metric off, or I'll add a metric on, but what it does is it gives me an excellent way of just popping in, checking on stuff, and then leaving.

So, check out Cyfe, Domo, or any of the other dashboard tools out there. I think they make a big difference in the tabs you're keeping on your business and don't cost a whole lot. Nice software. But, if you liked this video, make sure to enjoy, subscribe, and comment, and if you would like us to take a look at your data analytics, your website, get into some website optimization, get into really making your sales funnel hum, go to DoneForYou.com/start. Fill out the short little form and schedule a call, and we'll talk to you soon. All right? Thanks, bye.