Monitoring and measuring customer metrics is crucial to business growth and revenue generation, but where do you start? Read on for examples, and why a payments analytics dashboard can help.
Any business that involves taking payments online should be tracking customer metrics. If your business doesn’t, why not? There’s a lot to be said about trusting your gut and your instincts when it comes to business decisions, but add solid data to those instincts, and you’ll boost revenue generation even more.
If online sales are the lifeblood of your business, you should be aiming to make the most of them. And with up to 40% of online sales lost due to reasons that are within your control, doesn’t it make sense to use facts and data to get a better view of customer experience and sales performance?
Why Customer Metrics are Important
Data shows you how well your business is doing. Without key metrics, you’ll have a more challenging time knowing how to improve results and revenue. By understanding your customers and their actions, habits, and preferences as much as possible, you can make sure you align your actions and decisions with business objectives for greater success.
And it’s more than just knowing when and how customers act in specific ways. On top of drilling down the ‘why’, you should be monitoring and measuring metrics so you can make the necessary improvements and then measure just how well those improvements are working.
Using the facts and data you glean from analyzing customer metrics, you can pinpoint problem areas, look at possible causes and solutions, and monitor how well any solutions you implement are working.
Which Customer Metrics Should You Track?
You could come up with countless complicated customer metrics to track, but not all of them would be relevant or helpful to your business. You need to think about the metrics that really tell you something about your customers, something that can actually help drive revenue.
Here are some examples:
Authorization
Online card payments require authorization from the customer’s card issuer, and tracking payment authorization data lets you monitor how successful (or not) they are. It might be that certain issuers have difficulties, and analyzing the data means you’re more equipped to find out why that might be.
Sales
Sales are the central part of your business, so being able to measure and track metrics that relate to sales can be key to improving your bottom line. There are various types of things you can track here over and above simple sales figures. For example:
Conversion rate
How many visitors to your website go on to actually buy? If there’s no sale, is that because they leave after browsing? Maybe they’re just browsing and don’t find what they’re looking for, or maybe there’s something in your site design that makes it difficult for them to complete their purchase or signup. Perhaps they get to checkout and bail.
With the average cart abandonment rate for ecommerce sites a whopping 69.57%, it’s a big problem, but something you can work on if you know it’s an issue for your business. Â
Transaction value
Another valuable metric to track relating to sales is transaction values. How much are people actually spending on your website? Analyzing these data findings can help you make smarter business decisions. Is the average transaction high or low? If it’s low, do you need to look again at your pricing structure? How can you get customers spending more?
Refunds and chargebacks
Refunds often end up costing you money, and monitoring the causes of refunds gives you more clarity when resolving them. What reasons are your customers giving for wanting refunds? If you notice frequent customer returns because the customer received the wrong item, for example, you know what you have to work on. And as chargebacks may be down to fraud, part of the expected $20B+ lost to ecommerce fraud in 2021, it’s good to have the data you need to help prevent chargebacks and disputes.
Use Technology to Unlock Valuable Insights
By using technology to gain insights into the payments and customer information at your fingertips, your business can generate more revenue while cutting costs and boosting profits. A customizable analytics dashboard can highlight the figures and metrics that most matter to you and give you so much valuable insight into your payments environment. You’ll be able to identify trends and issues, and drill down into the data to get the insight you need to drive revenue and profits.
To find out how PayFrame’s payments analytics dashboard can help you turn data into revenue, get in touch today.
