What are Key Performance Indicators?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that help you calculate your business’s growth trajectory and the health of your various departments. Tracking KPIs helps you keep your business on track, and advises most management decisions. With the right insight, you will easily tell which efforts are worth more than others, and you can take action to correct unproductive decisions.
Key Performance Indicators to Keep an Eye on in Your Dashboard
1. Average Order Value (AOV)
The average order value (AOV) is one of the most important retail metrics. It evaluates the average spending whenever an order is placed in an e-commerce store. Being one of the most important KPIs, AOV provides critical insight into customer behavior.
A low AOV typically indicates that your customers prefer making small purchases in orders on average. AOV trends play a pivotal role in influencing critical management decisions, including marketing and pricing.
Since AOV is an essential KPI for most e-commerce stores, it is recommended that you carefully analyze it daily or weekly. The aim is to increase the average order value, which means more revenue and an eventual boost in profits.
2. Sales Conversion Rate
Your business’s sales conversion rate is the percentage of your prospects, visitors, and leads that make it through your sales funnel. To calculate the sales conversion rates of your business you need to divide the total number of sales by the total number of prospects and leads.
A high conversion rate on retail dashboards is a joy to any marketing team. A high conversion rate means you are more likely to convert people who visit your website, which means you have to bring in fewer visitors, which means less marketing spend. It is a good measure of the success of your overall business strategy.
It is advisable to calculate different conversion rates separately: total conversion rate, conversion rate for prospects, for visitors, and per traffic channel.
3. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
On average, three-quarters of all online shopping carts are abandoned by customers, which is a headache for most retailers looking to improve conversion rates. These retail metrics suggest that online e-commerce store owners urgently need to find out why customers are abandoning carts without proceeding to make a purchase.
A good example is a customer who had an intent to purchase, but they found their preferred payment option is not available in your store. You (the online store owner) should take appropriate action to prevent this in the future. Adding the payment option could be a great idea in this instance, but you could always direct them to sign up with a reliable payment option that is available.
Whether you decide to offer discount coupons or eliminate shipping costs, it is important to keep track of the cart abandonment rates and evaluate the effectiveness of your decisions.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost
Your business’s customer acquisition cost is the average amount it costs you to acquire a new customer. Customer acquisition cost is one of the crucial retail metrics in calculating the return on investment for various marketing efforts.
To calculate customer acquisition cost, you must sum up all the costs of converting prospective clients into customers and divide the sum by the number of prospects successfully converted into customers. To lower your customer acquisition cost, adjusting your marketing campaigns could be ideal.
It is also wise to calculate your customer acquisition cost per marketing channel. An expensive channel is not necessarily a productive one. By combining data from different sources, ClicData can help you calculate your customer acquisition cost, which will inform your marketing decisions and improve your ROI.
5. Customer Retention Rate
According to studies, it is five to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This means all efforts made to retain customers have a higher ROI for the same AOV.
Today the average customer retention rate is 63, which is one of the lowest due to the influx of online customers who purchase products irregularly. Nevertheless, customer retention is largely influenced by customer satisfaction rates. This leads us to the two most reliable ways of measuring customer retention rates; the percentage of customers that repeat a purchase and the customer satisfaction rates.
6. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value is the value of each customer to your business in the long term. CLV is critical when it comes to analyzing the long-term customer relationship with your business and narrowing it down to the channels that provide the best customers for the most ideal price.
The lifetime value of a customer varies with the type of product they are purchasing, and can therefore be easily estimated when calculating the ROI of each marketing channel.
7. Product Return Rate
Approximately 20% of all products purchased from e-commerce stores are returned to the stores, which, in most instances, necessitates a refund or an exchange. In most instances, products are returned to stores for fault in function or damage in delivery.
The product return rate should be as low as possible, and while it is impossible to attain a 0% product return rate, there are a few easy ways to decrease product returns. Some of the most popular include having a detailed description, including a reliable manual, and good quality and reliable image of the product.
A sudden rise in your product return rates is often a sign of a faulty product or product category. It is wise to align your goal to your industry’s standard. For instance, the average online shopping return rate for the clothing industry is 30%, which accounts for 21% of all product returns in the US.
8. Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are among the most popular KPIs for online businesses. Whether a verified customer makes a remark or simply likes or up-votes the product, they highly influence wary prospects. They tell your prospects how satisfying your product is to your customers, which ultimately influences their decision to purchase your product.
The ideal sales team will strive to push the reactions of your customers towards positivity and, if possible, enthusiasm towards the product. Angry reviewers should be approached with restrained and polite language, with the intention to assist them to their satisfaction.
You can track the number of good, neutral, and poor reviews per category (production, delivery, sales, and marketing) to better streamline your decisions.
9. Website Traffic
The last decade has seen some of the most unprecedented growth margins in online marketing by small and medium enterprises. Since most consumers are reliant on search engines to find out more about businesses and find their websites, website traffic is highly dependent on search engine algorithms.
By following the recommended Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices, you can improve the organic traffic to your website without lowering your AOV and conversion rates. With an increased amount of visitors to your website, your overall online marketing strategy works flawlessly.
You could also utilize the potential of pay-per-click, email marketing, and social media channels in driving more traffic to your website.
10. Top Product by Units Sold
Your business’s unit sale number represents the total sales of a given product within a specific period. This number is essential to determining which products are performing better or worse than others. The information is also critical in determining the price point of each product that brings in the biggest profits.
The top products by units sold metric shows you the best performing products, which can lead you to identify why they are doing better than others and get rid of redundant products. This metric is essential due to various reasons, including the fact that making a larger purchase (of the top products by units sold) gives you the opportunity to buy them at a lower cost.
11. Top Cross-sell Product
There is no shortage of levers to pull when trying to raise e-commerce sales. Cross-selling is one of the more popular strategies that persuade prospective clients to make purchases for complementary add-on products. A good example of advertising an ancillary (complementary) product is when a waiter asks you, “Do you want fries with that?”
The top cross-sell product is the product that sells best as a complement to another or other products you sell. Depending on your industry, your top cross-sell product should always be presented to your customers whenever they complete a purchase of the related product.
12. Perfect Order Rate
The perfect order rate is one of the most pivotal KPIs in measuring how many orders are shipped to customers without incidents, how many were late or inaccurate, and those that were damaged during shipment.
Every supply chain team aims to have a high perfect order rate since it shows that an organization is highly efficient and cares about customer satisfaction. There are different complications that can influence the perfect order rate of a business, such as goods damaged during transit.
13. Customer Satisfaction Rate
Customer satisfaction is the estimate of how effectively and efficiently your products meet your customers’ expectations. How satisfied is a customer with the product you sold them? Customer satisfaction rates highly influence your customer retention rates.
Customer satisfaction rate also plays a critical role in improving referrals and customer reviews for your products. There are various ways of measuring customer satisfaction including the use of questionnaires to your customers, user-friendliness score, and the net promoter score. The latter is an estimation of how likely your customers are likely to recommend your products to their family, friends, or comrades.
How Can ClicData Help?
ClicData is one of the most reliable modern data platforms that offer you nearly any feature you’d need from a data platform. By gathering information from different sources, ClicData can assist you in calculating all the key performance indicators and retail metrics explained above, and advise your marketing and management decisions.
ClicData also allows you to share your dashboard with other users seamlessly, enabling you to coordinate marketing strategies effortlessly. Utilizing real-time data, we can help your business make the most ideal decisions for growth in revenue. Contact us today.