Getting off the ‘no growth’ plateau

Getting off the ‘no growth’ plateau

What will a 5-10% increase in conversion mean for your business? If you can improve your average revenue per customer by 10% or have your customers visit, deposit or purchase more often what will that look like for your profit line?

These are all tangible opportunities that in this recession wrought economy and over competitive e-commerce space we hanker after but find difficult to deliver. How do we create this kind of change in our business?

Strategy and Data are words that gets most small or medium sized online business owners yawning, looking at their watches or opening up the next daily report on their blackberries. In our tactically driven entrepreneurial environment somewhere along the line we decided that strategy was irrelevant and data equalled analysis paralysis. So it became more important to do rather than think. No bad thing either. Let’s take the online gambling vertical as a prime example of tactics over strategy. The gods of right place, right time, a fair wind and blood sweat and tears have all helped the burgeoning e gaming sector capitalise on the zeitgeist that was online gaming. Then came the headwinds of legislation, regulation, taxation an oversupply of competing brands and a promiscuous customer.

So in the UK we have ended up with an online gaming market that is cluttered, and targeting a customer that is over served and demanding much more for less or nothing.

The recession or competition is often blamed when we find our business growth has plateaued. How do we now take that big leap forward which will give our business clear space from the competition and quantum growth?

As in all things in life there are no silver bullets but rather a combination of factors. At the heart of all these factors is a mantra, we at Datasprint regularly apply which is “think more, do less”.

It’s also important to choose the focus and structure of your thinking as random thinking is as harmful as tactical doing.

So, here are some top tips from our team at Datasprint that can help shift your business up a gear:

Your boss-your target customer

A few simple questions about your boss:

• Who is your target customer?

• What is the journey your customers undertake to find you?

• What is the transactional behaviour of your target customer?

• How do you get your target customer to want to spend more time and or money with you?

Your own business:

• What makes your business the money?
• What do you spend your time doing?
• How can you make more from your existing traffic?
• Who are the right types of customers for your business and are you managing how you reward them effectively?

Since early 2009, our consultants have been working with e-commerce, e-gaming and home shopping clients and online affiliates, helping them to realise that the solution to their growth issues were by and large externally defined but internally solvable. The approach we take is always strategic in nature, data driven and most importantly focused on Return on Investment or meeting a goal or target defined by our clients. Using predefined fields applied to our client’s customer level data our software solution presents trends and actions for you to implement to affect those trends. This allows our clients and you to optimise business performance by using customer level transactional data in a manner that can be easily executed and acted on by your existing resources and infrastructure. This methodology and tooling has seen us deliver double-digit improvements on key profit influencing metrics for our clients.

For your business to succeed clear space, fresh perspective and emotional distance is vital when you are thinking about the future. This is hard to do for a business employee or owner as there are a lot of personal dimensions in the relationship you have with your business. Working with a proven piece of independent and proven software gives you the clarity of vision you need for a fresh and qualified perspective on your business.

Michael Braga is a Director of DATASPRINT a Software As A Service Business Intelligence tool offering transactional businesses the opportunity of turning their volumes of transactional data into actionable data which can be used to drive their profit growth and can be contacted at Michael@datasprint.uk