MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

There are sev­eral key learn­ings we’ve been empha­siz­ing lately, and 2 mind shifts we’re really push­ing towards.

i. Think like a mar­keter in every­thing business-related

ii. Mea­sure every­thing –you need to know the met­rics of your business

Today, I’m going into deeper dis­cus­sion on the sec­ond point, measurements.

We are start­ing mea­sure a lot more, and it is really powerful.

Every indus­try does this –it’s called bench­mark­ing. We are now finally in a posi­tion to start doing that inter­nally, and that is going to dra­mat­i­cally accel­er­ate our success.

If I asked you right now, “What is your shop­ping cart aban­don­ment rate,” would you be able to answer? In 30 seconds?

If not, that is really bad because this is how you make your money.

The beauty of bench­mark­ing is this: when you have sev­eral dif­fer­ent web­sites, on all of them peo­ple start out on step one of the buy­ing process. But, you have to know how many peo­ple who get to the check out actu­ally make it to the ‘Thank You’ page.

Why? Because it’s crazy not to! This is a very impor­tant sta­tis­tic you need to know, so you want to know if your check­out is world class.

What is your shop­ping cart aban­don­ment rate?

10%? 20%? Or 50%? Do 10% or 50% of peo­ple on that par­tic­u­lar web­site com­plete the check­out? If you have 4 web­sites, can you tell in 30seconds which is doing bet­ter than the rest?

Even if you have that data avail­able ‘some­where’, that doesn’t really count because it must be eas­ily acces­si­ble. If it takes 10minutes and is a painful, painstak­ing process, peo­ple won’t check on those figures.

Is it worth get­ting some­thing that takes 3minutes down to 10seconds? YES.

Because if not, you never check the data because there is resis­tance. You won’t know for a long time if your check­out is bro­ken on Inter­net Explorer 6.0, for example.

If you had this data at hand, you could check all the time and instantly see if there was a prob­lem, if your sales sud­denly dropped to 10% from an aver­age of 50%. You could see that you have a prob­lem on a par­tic­u­lar web­site, and then you could go in and fix it. It’s easy to do. That is what I mean by world class benchmarking.

If you knew all this impor­tant infor­ma­tion instantly, you could also add indus­try aver­ages to your equa­tions. Or maybe you would just know that the indus­try shop­ping cart aban­don­ment rate is 50%, and you would then ana­lyze and instantly know how your busi­ness is doing.

The fact is, any time that it’s hard to get data, you get lazy. But, if you don’t do this, your check­out can be bro­ken for three months and you wouldn’t know it. Doing it man­u­ally is just not good enough.

If it’s not easy and effort­less, peo­ple just don’t do it. And if peo­ple don’t do it, you don’t know if you’re world class.

Les­son consumption.

With­out a lit­tle more effort, you can prob­a­bly track this way bet­ter than you are doing right now. You want to be able to know if you are world class in email deliv­er­abil­ity and/or in email copywriting.

• Look at the per­cent­age of peo­ple you email.
• You want to be able to instantly see which web­site is doing well, and which isn’t.
• When you know those fig­ures, that is cool. ‘Not cool’ is not hav­ing any idea at all.

On which of your sites is Les­son 1 work­ing bet­ter, A or B?

And what does ‘good’ even mean in rela­tion to all these?

When you have these answers, you can imme­di­ately improve your busi­ness. You want to be able to see all these facts and make the com­par­isons. Only such ana­lyt­ics can quickly tell you if your check­out really is work­ing or if you need to improve your emails for any one of your websites.

Bench­mark­ing is a very pow­er­ful tool to have at your fin­ger­tips, espe­cially when you launch new busi­nesses. When you can just go straight in and see these graphs, it can be crazy pow­er­ful stuff.

Another thing that could poten­tially be tested with fore­sight is your auto-responder. Per­haps you have always had the hypoth­e­sis that email deliv­er­abil­ity is bet­ter on one provider than another –and maybe you’ve never checked it because of lack of proper data.

When you make all of your money via email, imag­ine if emails from A get read 25% more times than emails from B. Which would you want to use? By mak­ing the right choice after test­ing and mea­sur­ing, your whole busi­ness would grow in rev­enue and profit overnight.

That is the power of col­lect­ing these numbers.

World-class bench­mark­ing and world-class mea­sur­ing will sky-rocket your inno­va­tion because when you have this data in front of you, the moment you com­pare and see a dras­tic dif­fer­ence you will take action.

Incre­men­tal improve­ment is the sin­gle fastest way to drive revenue.

Study the Toy­ota way.

How did they become a world-class car man­u­fac­turer? Toy­ota does this: con­tin­u­ous improve­ment.

With Kaizen and all the other sys­tems they have put in place, this is what they do:

• They bench­mark.
• They mea­sure.
• They improve.
• They fix.

Now, online mea­sure­ment is really hard –-a lot of the time, you don’t get Google ana­lyt­ics and your E-commerce fig­ures to sync. The good thing is though, it doesn’t mat­ter when you bench­mark because the same floor applies to all of them.

This kind of bench­mark­ing will help you to very rapidly move ahead.

Other core questions

How long does it take peo­ple to buy from your web­sites, after they have signed up? Is it one day? 3 days? 8, 21, 30? What are the fig­ures by website?

You may not know the answer today but imag­ine know­ing that peo­ple from Web­site A buy after 4 days, from Web­site B buy after 21 days, etc. Again, mea­sur­ing shows you the power and effec­tive­ness of which site is bet­ter at get­ting cus­tomers to buy.

Bench­mark­ing like a world-class busi­ness will really take you to the next level and can be game chang­ing for your busi­ness when you have to right data on which to take action. How are you measuring?

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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