12 Pieces of Consumer Data Your Small Business Needs to Monitor
Consumer data is one of the most valuable tools that is right at your fingertips. Using internal information and free tools like Google Analytics, you can develop audience personas for your customers and make decisions off of their behavior.
In past years, marketers would build audience demographics based on traits. They would describe the age, gender, and personality of the average customer. Today, modern marketers are more advanced. Along with these demographics, they develop entire profiles on how customers interact with the business. This consumer data is also used to spot red flags for the business when customer behavior changes.
If you’re not analyzing consumer data, it’s time to start. Here are 12 metrics you need to monitor in your organization to improve your marketing strategy.
1.) Average Ticket
There are two ways to increase sales in your organization: increasing the number of customers and increasing the average ticket. If you can grow the average ticket by just a few dollars, you can see significant increases in your revenue.
Always compare the average ticket to the number of people in your business when you’re evaluating its health. This will tell you a lot about customer behavior in your business.
2.) Frequency of Visits
The frequency of visits is the number of times customers return to your business within a year (or set time-period). A company like Starbucks has a frequency of visits of multiple times per week for some customers, while a spa might have monthly or quarterly visitors.
This metric will also be used to determine customer lifetime value and help you develop audience personas with the goal of increasing this frequency.
3.) Customer Acquisition Cost
The customer acquisition cost refers to the amount you pay in total marketing efforts to bring in a new customer. While Google Analytics and other tools will break this out by channel, you can calculate it on a high level by dividing your total ad spend monthly (or quarterly) with the number of new customers acquired.
This metric also highlights the importance of customer retention. If you pay $50 on average to acquire a customer, you don’t want them to leave your business after only spending $60. You want them to keep coming back to increase your overall ROI.
4.) Customer Lifetime Value
The customer lifetime value (CLV) is how much your customers will spend with your organization over the course of several years. The metrics you need to calculate this are the average ticket, the frequency of visits per year, and the number of years your customers shop with your brand.
While you might think spending $100 to acquire a customer is expensive, the effort is worth it if they spend $500 at your organization each year for 10 years.
5.) Engagement Rate
Advertising channels like social media and email marketing make it easy to track vanity metrics. Stats like number of followers (or subscribers) and potential reach don’t actually show how successful your promotion efforts are. Instead, focus on the engagement rate.
It’s better to send an email to 500 people with a 10% engagement rate (with 50 responses) than an email to 2,000 people with a one percent engagement rate (with 20 responses). Focus on quality of quantity with your data collection to learn how customers interact with your brand.
6.) Bounce Rate
The next step after engagement rate is bounce rate. This refers to the number of people who leave your website immediately after arriving. They don’t read your content and don’t care about your pages or products. Keeping an eye on this metric will help you understand the real number of website visitors who actually care about your pages.
7.) Time One Site
Time on site is a business website metric that is similar to the engagement rate. It refers to the duration (in minutes and seconds) that the average website user spends engaging with your brand or content. It doesn’t matter if you drive 10,000 people to your website if they all leave within a few seconds. You want to make sure your website is sticky, engaging, and keeps people clicking around.
8.) Average Pages Viewed
Marketers who look at time on site also typically look at the average number of pages viewed. Websites with high page view numbers tend to have higher conversion rates, as customers find the products useful and the content valuable. You can also use this tool to learn what pages customers leave quickly and where they find the most help.
9.) Website Conversion Rate
Like the engagement rate, the website conversion rate shows how successful your webpage is at moving customers to buy. This can be calculated in online sales or lead generation efforts like scheduled appointments and calls to your business. If your conversion rate is lower than average, you may need to adjust your online presence or marketing plan.
10.) Time to Purchase
The time to purchase metric calculates the amount of time from the customer’s first website visit to when they finally check out. Some websites might convert customers within a few minutes, while others notice customers take multiple days before they decide to buy.
This metric can be altered for brick and mortar locations and is defined as the time a customer spends in a store before they buy. While website managers might want customers to make purchases immediately, store owners might want shoppers to linger longer before they buy.
11.) Return Rate
This metric is important for businesses that sell physical products, but it could also be adjusted to track the number of refunds issued. Return rate can help you understand customer behavior and how they interact with products in your business. Are some products returned significantly more than others? Do customers by multiple products online and return the ones they don’t like? Spikes in return rates also mean you need to prepare your customer service team to help unsatisfied customers.
12.) Churn Rate
Churn is another consumer data point that is important, but hard to look at. This refers to the number of customers who leave your business and do not return. This could be clients for a massage therapist or customers for a mechanic. Churn helps you calculate customer lifetime value but also provides insight into why and when customers leave.
Develop a Consumer Data Plan With MyArea Network
We work with dozens of local business to execute their marketing plans and often start by looking at their consumer data. We can help you set up a customer data platform and then work with you to analyze that data and create plans based on what we learn from the consumer information.
Set up a free consultation with MyArea Network data specialists to discuss your business and top metrics that are relevant to your brand. This is the first step toward developing a successful marketing plan that drives sales and increases the satisfaction of your customers.
