Data-driven scaling: The 5 most important KPIs

Economist Peter Drucker already showed us why data is essential in entrepreneurship in his world-famous quote "What gets measured gets managed." This sentence impressively describes the goal of our journey: Getting data through measurement and using it profitably in the company.  

But what data do we need exactly? And what can we achieve with it?  

Data is summarized in so-called "key performance indicators", or KPIs for short. These function like individual parameters and can be specifically influenced to achieve certain goals. Brief example: Who is your best salesperson? If you know this, you can find out why he is so strong and use this knowledge for your other employees.  

Below you'll get an overview of the 5 most important KPIs you can use to directly drive your business to growth.  

1) Average shopping bag

Your average shopping bag shows you your most popular products as well as their combination and price in total. It tells you whether you know exactly what your customers want, what they value, and whether you are correctly identifying their goals and desires. Do you already know the average shopping bag of your customers?  

Many of our vendors couldn't answer this question before they switched to CopeCart. If you can't answer this question correctly, you, like many others, are showing yourself to be uncomprehending of your target group - and that is fatal.  

If you know exactly what your customers really need, you can use your marketing much more efficiently and target your products and their add-ons. You know what possible follow-up problems of your main offer are and can link solutions directly to them.  

For example: As a fitness trainer your main offer is the weight loss course for office workers with a nine to five job and little time. According to the average shopping bag, you know that this target group often books your sleep course for more restful nights. You can then add this including a small discount as an addon or order bump on your checkout page to intercept customers directly with the follow-up offer.  

2) Your cancellation rate

If your products are often cancelled and returned, then your marketing and sales process is working, but not your offer itself. This can be due to several reasons:  

- Your offer doesn't fit your target audience. You don't need to sell a refrigerator to Eskimos. If you can do that - respect, you are a good salesperson! But what do you get out of it? Numerous cancellations and dissatisfied customers because you sold them something they either don't need or doesn't solve their problem.

- Your offer is misleading. Are you over-promising? Or does your advertising go beyond the content of your actual product? This also results in a high cancellation rate, because people want what they think they bought. If you don't offer them that, they're disappointed.

Of course, your product may just be fundamentally "bad". That's why at CopeCart we've established the product validation process, where we check every product before an actual sale takes place. This happens in the background, so the vendor can theoretically sell directly regardless, but at the same time ensures that no absolute scam is crossing the counter.  

3) Total views of your sales pages

How often do your leads even get to your sales pages, i.e. the pages where the actual purchase takes place? This is where you can see how well your funnel is really working before checkout. You can easily check this by doing the following calculation:  

Total views on your sales pages / Total number of leads per campaign.  

If your call rate is below 3%, you should think about how to optimize your funnel. There are various possibilities here, but they would go beyond the scope of this article.  

In general, you should always make sure that you lose as few leads as possible at each step of your funnel to keep the total views of your checkout as high as possible. CopeCart's sales pages are highly optimized in terms of conversion, ensuring that visitors to your checkout are most likely to actually buy from you. In short, if your leads make it to the checkout, the sale is already as good as certain.

4) Your conversion rate

Conversion rate describes the rate at which your leads that land at your checkout actually buy from you. Here it depends on the platform and whether you get insight about this parameter - in CopeCart's dashboard you have all the data at a glance. But what can you do with it now?  

Basically the same as point 3, but much more specific. You need to understand that a potential customer who has ventured to your sales page is basically interested in buying from you. However, if you have a very low conversion rate, many will still bounce. This may be because they are put off by your checkout because it contains different information than your previous marketing. Or leads are shocked by your price and even feel outraged afterwards.  

Whatever the reason, the conversion rate tells you whether your checkout is going well or not. Our recommendation here is about 30%. Accordingly, almost every third prospect on your sales page should actually buy. For CopeCart's checkouts, this conversion rate is achieved on average and therefore considered standard.  

5) Your average customer lifetime value

CopeCart's dashboard uses artificial intelligence to calculate your average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). This value shows you the average revenue generated by a customer throughout their lifetime with you.  

You can use it, for example, to determine how much money you can spend on new customer acquisition per customer and still make a profit. This is therefore one of the most important KPIs in terms of your margin.  

You should also monitor whether your CLV has increased or decreased. In general, it can be worth taking a long-term look at your performance to assess whether the changes you've made have actually had a positive impact.  

CLV can also be a huge advantage when it comes to selling: Realize how valuable your customer really is or can be. You'll treat him very differently and be more likely to close him.  

Conclusion

With KPIs, you can specifically screw your business and thus scale it sustainably. Just by focusing on the 5 most important indicators, you'll have a huge advantage over the competition because you now know what impact they can have on your business.  

In CopeCart's dashboard, you have direct access to these KPIs, so you don't have to create them yourself or have someone create them for you. It is therefore very worthwhile to familiarize yourself with your own KPIs and optimize them as much as possible.

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