Increase Efficiency and Revenue with Analytical Reports

Your revenue is closely tied to your level of efficiency. Inefficiency leaks time, money, resources, and opportunities. Efficiency mitigates the potential for those elements to slip through the cracks.

 

You can’t fix a problem if you can’t identify the cause. If you’re silently losing revenue, you need to discover the source. You need to start utilizing analytical reports.

 

Analytical reports give clues about where your leaks are

 

An analytical report collects qualitative and quantitative data for the purpose of empowering business owners and employees to make better data-driven, evidence-based decisions. Most businesses are familiar with reports that show how much traffic they’ve received to their site, and what keywords are working in their SEO efforts.

 

Analytical reports are crucial for understanding how your visitors use your website, but they’re also profound windows into what could be working against you.

 

You wouldn’t take a rowboat onto the lake if you knew the bottom was filled with holes. If you aren’t aware of the holes, however, you’d discover them quickly.

 

A business can be filled with holes that drain revenue unbeknownst to the owner. Analytical reports can give you solid insight into where your business might be losing money.

 

Dashboards give you the information at a glance

 

Datapine explains how an analytical report is used in marketing. In their example, a dashboard displays visits, session duration, bounce rate, page views, and the conversion rate goal. It only takes a minute to notice if a strategy change is necessary. For instance, if visitors have increased but sales aren’t moving, it might be time to work on better landing pages or sales letters.

 

When you put analytical data into a dashboard, managers can make faster decisions and direct their teams into the next phase. Problem areas can be identified quickly, and solutions can be implemented faster. However, the solutions may not be obvious right away. Unlike water rising in a boat, symptoms of lost revenue can appear to have multiple causes.

 

Are you looking in the right place for solutions?

 

Analytics provide the data you need to notice areas that need improvement, but are you looking in the right place for solutions?

 

Say you log into your CRM and discover you’ve received 500 new email signups as of last week. You’ve been running a promotion, so the quick increase makes sense. You dig deeper into the data and find hardly any of your new leads have opened their welcome emails. You know your open rate should be higher. You’ve never had such a low open rate. What do you do?

 

Most people would reevaluate their emails. If they’re not being opened, there must be a problem with the email. Did it trigger spam filters? Was the subject poorly written? Did it get buried in the subscriber’s inbox because it was sent at the wrong time? All of these are possibilities to explore. However, there’s another possibility.

 

Do you know for sure your 500 new leads were actually sent a welcome email? Are your signup forms programmed to segment leads as they come in? If your email sequence is delivered to leads based on segmentation, and your new leads aren’t being segmented, that’s a costly problem.

 

Say the product you’re selling nets you a profit of $200 per sale. If just 10% of your 500 leads were to make a purchase, you’d generate $10,000 in profits. That’s $10,000 in revenue you’ve lost when your signup forms aren’t segmenting new leads.

 

Your revenue depends on your ability to analyze data

 

Thought leader Hugo Moreno from Forbes writes, “Those that position their organizations to manage data correctly and understand its inherent value will have the advantage.” Managing data correctly begins with collecting it and organizing it. Analytical reports provide that organization, but you’ve got to provide the brain power to see it objectively.

 

Sometimes the problem is obvious, but not always. For instance, if your latest email marketing message generated a high number of clicks but no sales, it could be that your email list isn’t as targeted as you think. Or, you may have accidentally sent that email to the wrong segment of your list. Maybe you linked the wrong product, or your website was down. Did your customers try to buy your product and give up when they had to sign up for an account first?

 

Poor data leads to lost revenue, but so does looking at data incorrectly or incompletely. Think beyond the obvious. Investigate lost revenue from every angle you can think of. Bring other minds in to dissect the situation and think of new possibilities. Data is only as powerful as your interpretation.