KPIs in Retail & Store Analytics

I like this post. While I added some KPIs to their list, I think it is a good list to get retailers on the right path…

KPIs in Retail and Store Analytics (continuation of a post made by Abhinav on kpisrus.wordpress.com:
A) If it is a classic brick and mortar retailer:

Retail / Merchandising KPIs:

-Average Time on Shelf

-Item Staleness

-Shrinkage % (includes things like spoilage, shoplifting/theft and damaged merchandise)

Marketing KPIs:

-Coupon Breakage and Efficacy (which coupons drive desired purchase behavior vs. detract)

-Net Promoter Score (“How likely are you to recommend xx company to a friend or family member” – this is typically measured during customer satisfaction surveys and depending on your organization, it may fall under Customer Ops or Marketing departments in terms of responsibility).

-Number of trips (in person) vs. e-commerce site visits per month (tells you if your website is more effective than your physical store at generating shopping interest)

B) If it is an e-retailer :

Marketing KPIs:

-Shopping Cart Abandonment %

-Page with the Highest Abandonment

-Dwell time per page (indicates interest)

-Clickstream path for purchasers (like Jamie mentioned do they arrive via email, promotion, flash sales source like Groupon), and if so, what are the clickstream paths that they take. This should look like an upside down funnel, where you have the visitors / unique users at the top who enter your site, and then the various paths (pages) they view in route to a purchase).

-Clickstream path for visitors (take Expedia for example…Many people use them as a travel search engine but then jump off the site to buy directly from the travel vendor – understanding this behavior can help you monetize the value of the content you provide as an alternate source of revenue).

-Visit to Buy %

-If direct email marketing is part of your strategy, analyzing click rate is a close second to measuring conversion rate. 2 different KPIs, one the king , the other the queen and both necessary to understand how effective your email campaign was and whether it warranted the associated campaign cost.

Site Operations KPIs / Marketing KPIs:

-Error % Overall

-Error % by Page (this is highly correlated to the Pages that have the Highest Abandonment, which means you can fix something like the reason for the error, and have a direct path to measure the success of the change).

Financial KPIs:

-Average order size per transaction

-Average sales per transaction

-Average number of items per transaction

-Average profit per transaction

-Return on capital invested

-Margin %

-Markup %

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

You can reach me at mailto://lauraedell@me.com or you can visit my blog where I have many posts listing out various KPIs by industry and how to best aggregate them for reporting and executive presentation purposes ( http://www.lauraedell.com ).

It was very likely that I would write on KPIs in Retail or Store Analytics since my last post on Marketing and Customer Analytics. The main motive behind retailers looking into BI is ‘customer’ and how they can quickly react to changes in customer demand, rather predict customer demand, remove wasteful spending by target marketing, exceeding customer expectation and hence improve customer retention.

I did a quick research on what companies have been using as a measure of performance in retail industry and compiled a list of KPIs that I would recommend for consideration.

Customer Analytics

Customer being the key for this industry it is important to segment customers especially for strategic campaigns and to develop relationships for maximum customer retention. Understanding customer requirements and dealing with ever-changing market conditions is the key for a retail industry to survive the competition.

• Average order size per transaction
• Average sales per transaction

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How Do You Use LinkedIn? (Social Media Infographics)

How often do you refresh your LinkedIn profile pic? Or worse, the content within your profile? Unless you are a sales exec trolling the social networking site or a job seeker, I would surmise not that often; in fact, rarely is most apropos of a description. Thoughts…? ( yes, she’s back ( again), but this time, for good dear readers…@Laura_E_Edell (#infographics) says thanks to designinfographics.com for her latest content postings!

And just because I call it out, doesn’t mean you will know the best approach to updating your LinkedIn profile. And guess what …there’s an infographic for that! (http://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraerinedell)

Check out my profile on LinkedIn by clicking infographic

“LAURA” Stratification: Best Practice for Implementing ‘Social Intelligence’

Doing an assessment for how and where to learn social media to better understand your business drivers can be daunting, especially when you want to overlay how those drivers affect your goals, customers, suppliers, employees, partners…you name it.

I came up with this process which happens to mimic my name (shameless self-persona plug) to ease the assessment process while providing a guided assessment plan.

First, ‘Learn’ to Listen: learning from the voice of the customer/supplier/partner is an extremely effective way to understand how well you are doing retaining, acquiring or losing your relationships with those who you rely on to operate your business.

Second, Analyze what matters, ignore or shelve (for later) what doesn’t; data should be actionable, (metrics in your control to address), reporting key performance indicators that are tied to corporate strategies and goals to ensure relevancy.

Third, Understand your constituent groups; it isn’t just your customers, but also your shareholders, employees, partners, and suppliers who can make or break a business through word of mouth and social networking.

Fourth, Relate your root causes to your constituents value perceptions, loyalty drivers and needs to ensure relevancy flow through from step 2. Map these to your business initiatives and goals exercise from step 2. Explore gaps between initiatives, value perceptions, loyalty drivers and corporate goals.

Lastly, create Action plans to address the gaps discovered in Step 4. If you analyzed truly actionable data in step 2, this should be easy to do.

To apply this to social media in order to turn it into social intelligence, you need to make the chatter of the networks meaningful and actionable.

To do this, think about this example:

 

A person tweets a desire to stop using a hotel chain because of a bad experience. In marketing, this is known as an “intent to churn” event; when social intelligence reporting systems ferrets out this intent based on scouring the web commentaries of social networks, an alert can be automatically forwarded to your customer loyalty, marketing/social media or customer response teams to respond, address and retain said customer.

A posting might say “trouble with product or service” – That type of message can be sent to customer operations (service) or warranty service departments as a mobile alert.

And a “having trouble replenishing item; out of stock” question on a customer forum can be passed along to your supply chain or retail teams — all automatically.

The Wynn has a great feedback loop using social media to alert them in real-time of customers who are dissatisfied with their stay who Tweet or comment about this during their stay.

The hotel manager and response time will find this person to address and rectify the situation before they check out. And before long, the negative tweet or post is replaced by an even more positive response, and best of all, WORD of MOUTH to friends and family.

Its sad to say, in this day and age, we are often left without a voice or one that is heard by our providers of services / products. When good service comes, we are so starved that we rejoice about it to the would. And why not? That is how good companies excel and excellent companies  hit the echelon of amazing companies!

50 Ways to Drive Traffic Online

I wanted to share with you this great article I came across – It walks you through the 50 ways to increase online traffic; I would add that if you are interested in building your own personal brand, or the “Brand YOU”, then this article is a must read:

http://www.gathersuccess.com/blogging-tips/50-ways-to-drive-traffic-online