Can you remember where your best buyers came from?
I spent a lot of time this month looking at old sales data and analytics.
It wasn’t really intentional.
The problems with Gumroad pushed me to look at some other platforms, and one of them had some excellent sales reports.
What was different about this tool is that it showed me where my customers originally came in as buyers.
It 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.
Then I started a longer look at my Analytics, again, prompted by the impending switch to Google Analytics 4 which is being pushed on us this summer.
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.
It takes a good look at the data every now and then to see these patterns that you might have missed.