By Ed Jaffe, Customer Intelligence Consultant, Hansa Marketing Services
Often, when one hears about business analytics, big firms (Amazon, IBM, Google) come to mind. However, analytics aren’t just for the big guys – small companies can also reap the benefits of business analytics to increase revenues and improve the bottom line.
Last year, I consulted with a small Consumer Product Goods (CPG) company. This two year old company’s primary sales channel was the internet, and they had received about 13,500 orders. The owners came to me knowing they had a retention problem (92% of customers ordered two times or less); however, because they had never analyzed their data, they were unaware of many factors impacting their business. By utilizing analytics, I was able to identify weaknesses and opportunities in their business, such as:
- 25% of their customers had made a purchase using a coupon code. However, the company lost money on 75% of orders with a coupon. This wouldn’t be a problem if it generated profitable customers, however only 5% of customers who had used a coupon code made more than one purchase.
- By developing business rules to identify gift giving, I was able to determine that customers spend significantly more money on gifts than they do on themselves.
- 46% of customers left the site (bounced) before even starting an order.
Armed with this new knowledge, we were able to generate strategies to improve their business. We suggested new creative which could be implemented to decrease the bounce rate, identified the few coupon codes which were profitable and flagged the “gift givers” to send them targeted offers. Just because this was a small company didn’t mean that we couldn’t use analytics to have a big impact on their bottom line.
About the Author: Ed Jaffe is a Customer Intelligence Consultant with Hansa Marketing Services. He has several years of experience working with small and large businesses to develop media and marketing strategies. His focus includes customer segmentation, consumer insights, marketing measurement and email marketing. Ed has a Master’s Degree in Marketing from Northwestern University / Medill IMC. He can be reached at ed.jaffe@hansamarketing.com.
