Unless you’re analytical by nature, dealing with business metrics may seem mind-numbingly mundane or induce hair-pulling frustration. How much more exciting to focus on branding, business development, new products in the pipeline…
Yet the numbers tell the story. Knowing your metrics means understanding your business.
Running a business is complicated enough, with myriad daily tasks (or crises) competing for your attention. It’s all too easy to postpone crucial strategic thinking and number crunching sessions that lead to informed decisions.
What’s the best way for a busy executive to monitor a company’s web effectiveness? Email. Why?
Your email inbox is where much of what’s going on in your business is also happening. You tend to check email when you have a few minutes to spare. By setting up reports to come directly to your inbox with your company’s essential numbers, you’ll be able to monitor exactly how your business is doing.
To maximize the benefit of email reports:
- Design them to deliver the relevant numbers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
- Schedule the reports to run in the middle of the night so that each morning, a fresh report greets you when you download email: up-to-the-minute information about what’s happening in your business that is immediately actionable.
- Add all relevant team members to the email list so everyone will be literally on the same page, managing identical numbers, rather than making individual interpretations of the data in the company’s analytics or dashboard software.
The benefits of this email strategy?
- Regular reporting will enable you to develop a long-range view and gauge the pace of what is going on in your business.
- Instead of “flying blind”, you’ll understand your business’s key drivers: daily revenue, which sources of traffic drive the most traffic/leads/revenue, what devices people view your site on, your most popular products, etc. Your strategic decisions will be based on fact, not on projections or wishful thinking.
The alternative is logging into a dashboard and viewing multiple screens, which takes active effort. Receiving an email requires almost no effort; it would be hard NOT to do it!
After working with a number of clients to create these critical report emails, we built our own software to handle this process for you. Sign up at Coastics.com.
The final puzzle piece? Expert consulting to support your analytics. Working with you, Cro Metrics will:
- Establish your key metrics (KPIs)
- Ensure they’re being tracked in your analytics package
- Set up the reports
- Monitor and interpret them for you.
If you need additional help on analysis of the reports, methodology, or understanding your customers’ needs and your value proposition, contact Chris Neumann for a consultation.