Are you ready to take your business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great.
Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you are at right now.
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now.
Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information. You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. If you use a spreadsheet you have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help you get a clearer picture. But if spreadsheets scare you, just use a notebook or word processor.
Traffic
To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from.
Email List / Subscribers
Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers.
Customers
Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates.
Income & Expenses
Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. You might find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis.
Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places. Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service, for example. But it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers.
The email service I use and recommend is Aweber (sign up for a free account here) which gives you lots of data about your subscribers.
My shopping cart is ThriveCart which I highly recommend for its extensive features, comprehensive business data and analytics and exceptional service and support.
Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly. This way you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years.
And, most importantly, you can easily see what you need to be working on to improve your business into the future.
