According to a 2015 study by ATKearney, the global online retail revenues surpass the 1 billion USD mark and the annual market growth is above %20. This shows that the numbers have never been better and the future for all e-retailers looks rather promising.
Frankly speaking, running an ecommerce business in this digital age is quite a task. It is a given that competition is at its peak. Today, almost everything is sold online. After all, it is a matter of convenience for people and ecommerce businesses have struck the right chord by providing products and services at the doorstep.
To make an e-firm successful, the owner must think from all angles. sales and marketing, logistics and operations, metrics and KPIs and so forth. While we will not dig deep into the first two brackets, we can certainly offer inputs on metrics – the ones ecommerce businesses must measure to grow and flourish.
Average Order Value (AOV)
It is defined as the average amount a customer spends when he or she places an order on an ecommerce website. It is calculated by dividing the total value of all orders with the number of orders.
The reason it should matter to an ecommerce business is because a higher AOV means that, on an average, the business is making more profit per customer – and who wouldn’t want that?
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
This metric is nothing but the value of an average customer during his or her entire relationship with an ecommerce company. It is the amount of money made from a customer before he or she switches to a competitor or stops using the product altogether.
User habits increase how long and how frequently customers use a product, resulting in higher CLTV.
Even though it is hard to predict this metric, once the ecommerce business notices high-value customers, it should examine their behaviour and try to replicate the positive experience they have had had because of other brands.
Cart Abandonment Rate
This one’s simple and very important – it is the percentage of visitors who added products to their shopping process, did or did not reach till the checkout point but did not complete the payment process.
Basically – the lower the cart abandonment rate, the better it is. The ecommerce business must understand the potential customers’ inclination to buy. And the best way to start doing so is by analysing their abandonment cart.
Website Traffic
Yup – this one’s shocking, isn’t it? The whole and soul of an ecommerce business depends on its website and if it is unable to drive traffic to it, then it can hardly generate any sales! Look for unique visitors, bounce rates, source for maximum traffic, visitors per page, etc.
Since there are so many sub-metrics associated with website traffic, all ecommerce businesses can make use of this metric in some form or the other. The key is to focus only on those figures that can help them fetch desired results.
Product Return Rate
Let’s be realistic – this should be taken into consideration at all times. A high return rate indicates there is a problem with the product – simple. Do you know returns are costly as they take up twice the time for processing before shipping and then again, on return?
Therefore, segmenting the return rate by products and categories will help the e-firm to remove the underperforming products from the catalog and offer only those products to the buyers thay they actually like!
Support Rate
This indicates the number of visitors and customers who need support before making a purchase. If this metric is too high, then the business needs to put more effort into providing more information about the product and generic FAQs.
An e-firm must have strong support contacts in the form of live chat, email and phone that are not only visible but also user-friendly.
The Suite That Does It All
This one-in-all suite is a boon for ecommerce businesses. Wigzo’s machine learning technology tracks the target audience across all digital platforms. Noting their demographics, conversations they are engaging in, their conversion triggers and previously-made purchases, it helps create a 360 degree user profile.
User profiling is then used to create smart segments of the audience, that can be targeted using custom campaigns. The technology delivers a holistic view of who the customer is, what he is looking for, what interests in, why he wants something and how this data can be used to convert him.
Behavioural automation by Wigzo combines marketing automation with individual behaviours of the target market. This opens up a whole new realm for marketers – boosting their campaign results.
The combination has led to marketers experiencing higher open rates, click rates and conversions on their digital campaigns. Combining behaviour and automation lets one achieve granularity for creating segments of just one, for one-to-one communication.
[This post first appeared on Wigzo’s official blog and has been reproduced with permission.]
