How To Use Data Analytics To Unlock Sales Online

 

We live in a world driven by data analytics.  Namely sales data analysis.  Analytics, statistics, and numbers – it is a channelized interplay of all this that we can see the things placed in a 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 or so 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?

Simply because 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. It is because of the data or the so-called cookies that these systems use, because of which we see those ads floating around on our computer screen.

And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this post, we are going to discuss the countless ways in which 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 Improve Sales And Marketing Using Data

As a business, you want to generate as much traffic for your website as possible so that you can convert them. For this, 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 huge amounts of seemingly meaningless numbers.

Only quantifying and analyzing data can help you figure out 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 of data analytics, you can eventually get to know about the methods that are driving the best numbers to your website.

Once you have those numbers you can easily analyze the sales data and focus on putting more efforts in that direction, rather than continuing with the hit and trial streak.

2. Targeted Marketing Using Data Analytics

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

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. By 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 effective audience.

So, you can plan the marketing efforts targeting that particular audience and kill it out there 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 reach them?

What are the best methods and the best time to get in touch with them? This is something that can be achieved with data-driven predictive analysis.

If you have a business that has been running for long, gathering past data to study the customer behavior and understanding the results of interaction with them in the past 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 certain of one thing – running more efficient marketing campaigns.

What this means is that you can be more specific when dealing with customers, create campaigns that are more targeted, and hence require less effort to create and implement.

Now the ultimate result of all this would be – low costs and better ROI.

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 are putting in is what creates a successful business. With the help of data analytics, you can easily achieve this goal without facing any trouble.

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

• How you can effectively track marketing data,
• How to decide what costs you should cut, and
• How to find 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 business evolve?

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

Now, this is where again data analytics can play a big 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 – the numbers that you can only with the help of data analytics.

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

6. Better MRR Because Of Data Analytics

For those of you who are not into sales, MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue.

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

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

So, you can easily 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 are going to do with it before you collect it.”

And, today’s businesses have found the hidden power of data. They know what they are going to do with it; therefore they are investing such huge sums in data and predictive analytics.

If you too want to 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:

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, then there are things you can do to influence that traffic. You can move them into sales funnels. You can do things like exit pops, you can put banners on your website, you can serve advertising to start making money.

Hey, this is Jason Drohn. Today I want to talk about how businesses use analytics to improve sales, to improve website optimization, and to improve conversions. Basically how to make more money with the traffic that is already coming 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. You just log in with your Gmail username, your Google account username, you go to analytics.google.com and then you start your account. Then it will ask you what website do you want to track?

And, do you want to track website, app, whatever. You want to track 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. You need to start tracking data because here's the thing. Every single day that you are not tracking your data analytics is lost. 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 login 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, they 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, then there are things you can do to influence that traffic. You can move them into sales funnels, you can do things like exit pops, you can put banners on your website, you can 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 businesses use data analytics. I have been digging through website data for the last 13, 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 of 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, 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 key metrics, leads, and sales. Those things influencing 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, there are lots of things that 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 was a hero box. A hero box, right up top, with an image and 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 then a little sub-headline, and there is 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 just 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, and the button sends 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 that we want to have 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, then you're going to have twice as many people ... All things remained even ... You have twice as many people who are going to opt-in for that lead and then move into your email list. So, there are lots of different ways that the data analytics can be used there. When we're 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 headline on the landing page and split testing three or four different headlines there. 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 crazy 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 very basic 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. You know, what pages are getting an uncommon amount of traffic to those pages, and then what is happening on those pages. For instance, we have 400 blog posts. So, what are the 20 or 30 blog posts that are getting most of our traffic, and then how were the keyword phrases influencing that traffic?

For example, our website is a sales funnel page. On our sales funnel page, our sales funnel offer, I think we're ranked for 170 keyword phrases. Now, those 170 keyword phrases all with some derivative of sales funnel in it are ranging ... Some of them are the first page, some of them are page 10 in Google. A lot of them are page five, page six. We're getting quite a bit of traffic searching from sales funnels, but what we want to do is we want to move as many of those page four, page five keyword phrases up closer to page one, page two, and then move the 10's to page five. So, we're constantly pushing, trying to push those keyword phrases up the ranks 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 that are sending us traffic. Another thing I'm looking for is paid traffic campaigns, which ads are sending an uncommon amount of sales or an uncommon amount of call signups or whatever, whatever we're looking for. I'm looking for all this stuff in the client's campaigns, too. I'm always looking for the data that says what were the small things that 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 that is in that video, they are reacting to the landing page better, so they're opting in on the landing page and then they're moving through the sales funnel faster.

I know it sounds weird, but 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, you can see what the conversion rate on the sales video is. And ultimately, you can track how much time it took in most CRM's. You can track how much time it took for somebody to click the ad to purchasing. There's a buyer lifecycle cycle report in some of the more advanced CRM's. So, you know that that particular video gets you better conversion and drastically reduces the customer life cycle, which is awesome stuff. Do you know what I mean? So, the biggest 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 a nice tool called Cyfe, C-Y-F-E. You can build a nice little dashboard spread so you can check on it. I check on it once a day, see what my trending analytics are. But, it just keeps me good on the numbers that are important to me at that moment. 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 a nice way of just popping in, checking on stuff, and then leaving.

So, check out Cyfe, or Domo, or any of the other dashboard tools out there. I think they make a big difference in the tabs that you're keeping on your business, and they don't cost a whole lot. Nice software. But, if you liked this video, make sure to like, subscribe and comment, and if you would like us to take a look at your data analytics, your website, and get into some website optimization, get into really making your sales funnel just 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.