Do You Know How to Measure the Growth of Your Business?
Hi Brian here again, how is 2019 starting for you? The second part of the Rock 2019 series is available, how to measure growth, read on to find the details!
What has been happening?
As you may remember from the last blog posting, I went off piste, so to speak for a few weeks. We had fun going home though.
We had to check out by 10:00, and popped into a local farm shop for a traditional full English breakfast to fuel us on the way home. Headed off about 11:00. It had only taken us 6 hours to drive there, so return should be OK…
Pile of stones on the horizon?
Recognise Stonehenge? Starting to get dark and not half way yet. Unfortunately the light was not good by now. Passenger managed a quick picture against the sky line, using mobile whilst we drive pass
We were traveling on the day after the holidays, twas more like 9+ hours. And the first services stop was a shambles, the toilet queue was dozens of people, only one disabled and one unisex.
Rock your business in 2019 – continued
The above example shows how important planning is in your business. Did you read the last blog post? Here it is.
Here is the second part in our series, about how to measure growth in your business.
You Have To Know Where You’re At Right Now To Measure Growth & Figure Out What You Should Be Working On
Are you ready to take your online business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold 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 stop and look at where you’re at right now.
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. 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.
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. You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have 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
To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from.
List / Subscribers
Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers.
Customers
Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates.
Income & Expenses
Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. 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. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis.
How to measure growth: Wrap it up
Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service for example, but it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers.
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.
To Be Continued……….
Brian
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