I spent a lot of time this month looking at old sales data and analytics.
It wasn’t on my plan, but every once in a while I remember the things I should be doing to grow the business, that aren’t content and product.
I’ve been getting a funnel ready to move out of just social media and into running ads, and reporting suddenly leaps up your priority list when that happens.
Allow me to go on an old man rant for a moment…
If you look at old direct response pieces like direct mail or press ads, the order form always had a little code on it somewhere. Sometiome it was hidden in the address like:
Dept AB1234, Company name, Street name etc.
That code told you exactly what publication the offer had been placed in, and what version of the ad was used if you were testing.
You’d keep it against the original customer record, and against every other order they placed.
The value in this is it doesn’t just tell you where your orders come from, it tells you where your customers come from. Because the original source of a customer is important.
You’d be in serious trouble if you sent out an ad without this media code, and yet very few online systems seem to hold this valuable data.
You might think you just "know" where your customers are from, but you probably just think about where the noise comes from.
My data showed up that products that I’d thought of as "successful" didn’t always bring in the best customers.
I found out that a product I’d dropped as not a great seller, brought in the highest value customers on my list and whilst it was about 8th on the front-end it was my 2nd most valuable route into my buyers list.
I discovered that Medium, (which I’ve thought of as a dying platform), has brought in some of my best customers.
This happens more often than you’d think.
It’s almost a law that the easier the front end is to attract, the worse customers they are throughout the rest of the business.
The value of customers that come in via my $1 deals is about 8x the ones coming in from free lead magnets.
But we get overrun by the emotions of viral tweets, big view numbers and followers.
Meanwhile our real customers sit silently in the background, buying our products without fuss.
I’ve had zero contact with half of my top 10 biggest buyers.
They never comment on my social feeds. They just read, and they buy. They’re like whales lurking in the deep while the sardines thrash around on the surface.
A dig into data like this can really show you some surprises about what a good customer looks like, and it’s often not the social channel that takes up most of your energy.
If you have a regular flow of leads and sales, what are the numbers you’re paying closest attention to? Are they "front end" numbers like followers and opt-ins, or are they sales figures and where they came from?
