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 happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you’re at right now and to plan where you want to go next. Knowing your current business position allows you to understand how the business is making money, where you growth opportunities are, and where you can create new products and services. You want to measure your growth to figure out where to put your efforts.
Know the Numbers
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money more effectively if you know exactly where you’re starting from. By recording the data, you can 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. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information. You can write it in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. Using a digital spreadsheet can be fun as it can calculate additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics!
Now, let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record.
Traffic
To grow a business need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic to your website. It also requires 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. To understand your site traffic, look at your mailing list, if you already have one. The list provider tracks how many people are on your list, how many add themselves to your list after you reach out somehow and also, how many unsubscribe after a mailing or just get off the list for other reasons. By the way, don’t panic when you get unsubscribes; it’s only normal. I used to worry about that but realized some people don’t want a certain type of information, they might be on too many lists, or have lost interest in certain programs. I’ve unsubscribed from mailing lists too when the topic is no longer relevant or if I’ve completed a program, or just have too many similar emails.
Get Subscribers to Your List
The next goal is to continually get new subscribers on your email list. This is important in any field if you need to stay in touch with customers or others. For example, a nonprofit should also maintain a regular newsletter and have a mailing list. Those on the list would be donors, community members, some clients, volunteers, and even some staff. In this data field you want to track the 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. You’ll also see which topics your subscribers respond too the most.
Customers
Subscribers are great, because they become customers, which is even better. In fact, a business without customers has lots of work to do. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases are made per day, week, and month. Another important number to track is the total lifetime value of your average customer. That means tracking the same customer for repeat purchases. You also want to track for refund rates. This data lets you know how much any customer spends with you over time. This also lets you understand your best selling products or services, the topics that sell the most, and the delivery method of the products or services, such as live events or workshops, on-demand programs, group coaching, and so on, that are most successful.
Financials – Income and Expenses
Another important group of data are the financial numbers for the business. You want to know 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. It’s best to track these numbers daily, i.e., track your income source and amount. Also, accurately track expenses. You could incur these online and offline through various purchases and expenses to support business operations. If you don’t track these numbers regularly it’s easy to miss some of this data. If you don’t track daily, at least collect your receipts and invoices and track them on a monthly basis. You will be able to know how much each product and service earns, which are not selling or selling poorly, and more. Then you can decide how to proceed with each product or service. For instance, you could sell more of the good sellers. You might need to repurpose, put on a special sell, or delete some of your inventory. Your financials will of course let you know how successful your business is overall.
Where to Find the Data
To find this data, you can look 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. When 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.
