Partner Article

Love your figures

Ian Cowley is the founder of www.cartridgesave.co.uk the UK’s largest dedicated printer cartridge company. Using a scientific approach to marketing Ian and his Marketing Director Sean Blanks, have created a Sunday Times Fast Track 100 e-retailer which manages 30,000 orders a month; ranks above all its competitors on independent shopper surveys on sites including Google, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla; and is the UK’s fastest growing printer supplies retailer in terms of sales.

It’s a good time to be an SME. The data you require to identify cause and effect on your bottom line is – for the first time – readily available completely free of charge.

For stat lovers like us, this is music to our ears. Especially as we prescribe to the Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, school of thought. He is a huge advocate of companies that turn data into products – i.e. businesses who use data to identify what their customers want and build products to meet that need. And we agree, as ultimately this allows you to keep the customer at the centre of everything you do.

Therefore, knowing how to harness this data is key. But how do you turn all the numbers into strategy?

Start simply. Install Google Analytics, a fantastic tool available free of charge, which allows you to audit your website. Visit the page daily to keep a close eye on the effects that changes in variable has on traffic and conversion. Taking this detailed approach puts you in the ideal situation to trial and test small tweaks that might reap great results. You can quickly work out if something is going well, allowing you to maximise the impact and conversely, if it’s not well received, drop it.

Learn to love data obsessively. Take a micro approach and trial and test one or two things at a time so you can explore the best possible system to finality, however, always question your data. Just because the figures are there in black and white, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily right. Extend your analysis if they don’t seem to add up instinctively.

Thirdly, there are basic rules all SMEs should follow - and no business owner is exempt. To start, know that to be successful you need to measure all you do. Therefore compare your prices with those of your competitors; measure your customers’ response to one product over another. Furthermore identify short, medium and long-term goals. With these targets goals in sight, you can identify the tactics required to attain them and trial, test and analyse success as each step is implemented.

Finally it’s worth taking inspiration from companies who are doing well. Is there something you can glean from their approach? We still see ourselves as a start-up and use peers from other industries to help us set benchmarks to aspire to.

One last thing - don’t outsource analytics. Even if dealing with numbers seems like another language to you, you need to get a handle on your figures. Whether you amass stats from website analytics, emailer responses, social media engagement or the infinite methods to obtain free data, you should be able to interpret the results and put these into strategy. Know what your customers respond to, so that you can influence future sales and drive the success of your brand. Get a head for figures and get ahead!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Cartridge Save .