How to Use Analytics to Boost Your Startup Results

If you’ve recently launched a new business or plan to soon, you’ll have numerous tasks on your to-do list. One that’s well worth doing but that not many people commit enough time and effort to is using analytics to understand and improve different factors in your organization. 

If you want to help your startup have the most solid footing possible as it gets going, there are multiple ways you can analyze data for assistance.

Learn About Your Customers

One of the best ways to use analytics is to learn more about your customers. Data will help you understand the target market you hope will buy from you, plus current clients who already have. The more you know these people, the better you can tailor your offerings and website and other factors to generate their interest. In turn, this will help you get more sales. 

You should see a boost in initial sales plus repeat business because you know what people actually want. Use the information you learn to help you see how to offer more products or services that suit consumer needs and find shoppers where they’re searching for wares. 

You can use a comprehensive web analytics tool on your website to see how browsers move around your website and look for items or information. Discover the kinds of search terms they input and the links they used to get to your site. Learn where these links stem from, such as social media pages, blogs, forums, or by directly inputting your company’s website address. Also, use analytics to discover the order of pages that browsers look at on your site and where they are when they click away. 

Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

If you have a dedicated online store, you’ll know how frustrating a high shopping cart abandonment rate can be, where people put things in their digital cart but don’t complete their transactions. Happily, analytics information can help you combat this issue and reduce the abandonment rate so you can grow your startup more quickly. Even converting an extra two percent of shoppers will give you a significant boost in annual revenue. 

Often, people don’t bother finalizing their purchase online because they’ve had problems with your website or the processes or information (or lack thereof) on it. Use analytics to find out what kinds of issues shoppers have and how you might address them. Keep testing and measuring until you see results.

Consumers might, for instance, find your checkout too confusing or laborious, or they might not find your shipping rates, timeframes, or returns policy conducive to their needs. They might not see the payment type they wanted, or they may worry about how secure your site is, among other things. Through analytics, you can understand where in the cart process people click away and if they return at some point or not. 

Improve Inventory Management

If you run a business where you hold a lot of stock, you’ll always be looking for ways to improve inventory management techniques. Supplies get costly and can create cash flow problems and lots of stress. Plus, it’s almost impossible to grow a startup effectively if you have too much money tied up in goods that don’t sell. However, analytics can make things easier for you. 

Use software to run reports so you know how much stock you have on hand of each item, plus statistics on how many goods you possess in each category. Let data show you the amount sold of each product since you first added it to your inventory list, when you last sold stock of each piece, and when there’s most demand for certain products during the year. 

The details you analyze will help you see which stock to discount and stop buying more of, so you can put more money into bestselling gear instead. Analytics information makes it easier to know when to stock up on popular items and it gives you ideas of the types of goods to further test out with your customers. There are numerous inventory factors you can keep track of with analytics and many benefits from doing so. 

You might use analytics in other ways in your business, too. For example, this concrete data can help you see how to provide better customer service, make wise marketing decisions for your campaigns, and cut costs in different areas of your organization. 

Think about how you operate your venture and the types of decisions you have to make throughout the year. This might guide you in finding additional strategies for taking advantage of analysis programs to boost your startup. 

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