#260 3 Key Metrics to Supercharge Your Online and E-Commerce Sales

“You know that your website has a good user experience. If you're not getting that, then you need to take a look at the way your website is designed. And then from there, you take a look at basically getting people who've already purchased from you to buy again.”

Welcome to Thrive by Design, the podcast for ambitious independent jewelry brands, looking to profit from their products, get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love, without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing and scaling your business. Spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make you ready. All right, let's do this.

Tracy: Welcome to the thrive by design podcast episode 260. It's Tracy Matthews here chief visionary officer Flourish and Thrive Academy and I am here today to talk to About the three key success metrics to supercharge your online and e commerce sales. Now I am really excited about this new masterclass. You know, we've been really taking a deep dive look into what's working in online marketing lately. You know, I know that in the jewelry and creative product industry, there are so many ways to sell products. And I know a lot of you have been, you know, really banking on in person shows and wholesale and a lot of other ways to build your business and, and you might even sell your jewelry and products online, which is fantastic. And I know in our community that many of the designers we work with, have a goal of selling more online.

And I know in our community that many of the designers we work with, have a goal of selling more online. So you know, we're trying to think like what would it take to make one sale a day on your website, because I know for people just starting out that would be a really good number and for many people, you know one sale to sale, three sales, maybe even want to get to 100 sales a day. And the only way to really Figure out how you want to get there or how you can get there is to understand the numbers and what it really takes from a traffic perspective and all these other things in order to get that goal or in order to reach that goal I should say.

And that's why I'm hosting a brand new masterclass called supercharge your sales. I'm really excited about it. It is primarily going to be focused on Well, it's going to be focused on sales in general, but we're going to be angling more on online sales for this particular masterclass. And what I'm going to be diving into is all about everything about what's working right now, because we just wrapped up a study. We extended the study for a while and we have over 1000 entries. 

If you're doing well, I also want to encourage you to come to this class. And if you happen to be one of those unicorns that's in the middle, I also want to encourage you to come to this class, because at the end of the day, our goal is to help you make better data driven decisions for your business, so that you can measure what is actually working because there's nothing more frustrating than saying like, you know, I have this goal, but how do I get there and you're trying to work backwards and you're making these kind of ghost numbers up because you have sales goals or whatever, but you're not really thinking strategically about what metrics or what actual data needs, you need to understand in order to make this work. And that comes back to you really being able to analyze what you're doing now and analyze the specifics. Things that are actually working. And I know that sounds super boring for a creative person. Trust me, I'm like the most creative you can possibly get. But I am also obsessed with growing businesses. And quite frankly, without the numbers, we can't make good decisions, and we're flying blind.

And I've learned this so many times over and over again, that when I don't have clear, concise data, and to know exactly what I need to be looking at, it becomes very, very hard to continue to achieve goals that we're trying to achieve in business, and so on and so forth. So I really want to encourage you to join that class, we're going to be uncovering, we're going to be diving deeper into success metrics and what you need to be measuring, in order to grow your sales and also, also what you need to be looking at, to know if your marketing is actually working because I think that's really important.

And I've learned this so many times over and over again, that when I don't have clear, concise data, and to know exactly what I need to be looking at, it becomes very, very hard to continue to achieve goals that we're trying to achieve in business, and so on and so forth. So I really want to encourage you to join that class, we're going to be uncovering, we're going to be diving deeper into success metrics and what you need to be measuring, in order to grow your sales and also, also what you need to be looking at, to know if your marketing is actually working because I think that's really important.

Plus, we're going to be talking about the three part simple system that you can embrace. Now if you want to survive in this current climate, and even thrive, I would say I'm also going to talk about some simple sales tactics that can bring in as little as 2000 to two as much as 39,000. And just about two hours worth of sales time and I'm also going to be uncovering some high level results from this, the 2020 state of the jewelry and creative product industry report. Now we are only releasing this report to people who filled it out. So sorry if you missed the boat on that. There might be an opportunity when I decide to sell it, but I probably won't. I really hope we promoted this for a while.

So if you didn't if you missed the boat on it, then you missed the boat. We're going to be talking at a very high level we're not going to be giving any granular details but we are sharing some of our key findings from that so that you can make informed decisions about what to do next in your business. So if you'd like to join us, we have limited seats available you can head on over to https://www.flourishthriveacademy.com/supercharge-masterclass/ that's https://www.flourishthriveacademy.com/supercharge-masterclass/. We will, you can reserve your spot right there. 

And join us for the class on July 22. I'm super excited about it. Anyway, I wanted to dive into this because one of the things that I think is really, really valuable and we don't look at enough as creatives is the numbers and the numbers I'm talking about aren't just sales numbers, because I know that that's a tendency, it's easy to look at sales. We might even look at our profit and loss statement or a balance sheet in our accounting programs or whatever it might be, you aren't looking at those things you need to be. And we also might be somewhat looking at profit margins, so we know what our profitability is. And if you're not doing any of those things, it's it. There's no shame in it, but I want to encourage you to start looking at it. 

So we started really digging deep into this because I was getting questions in our insiders group and in other places, about you know, what, what is it really going to take if I wanted to get to a place where I'm making one sale a day on my website. Now for some of you that might sell Don't like a small number. But you can use this understanding of the metrics to change the math and basically do any number. Like if you want to make 100 sales, you would be able to work backwards and figure out how many people you need to get into your vortex in order to actually make those sales. And I was fascinated by this because a couple of years ago, a designer who had taken her laying the foundation program, commented on our group, and she said something along the lines, like I'm getting a ton of traffic to my site, and I haven't made any sales. And so I asked her a little bit deeper. 

I said, Well, how much traffic Are you getting to your site? And she said, Well, I had 68 visitors to my website last month. Well, if we think about regular conversion metrics, like I was thinking about this, I'm like, well, that's not a lot of traffic. And I don't know what people's expectations are because and I also don't know if that traffic was for her was unique visitors because the thing is, is if you're not looking at unique visitors or website sessions, as it's called, called different things in different programs, and you don't understand, Stan, what the difference between those things are, I'm not going to go super in depth into that right now. Then it could even be that you're looking at your website 68 times and you're not paying attention to actually are those unique visitors? Or is it you or someone on your team checking things out on your site.

And it turned out that it was no one was really hitting her site, because I think, and it was just like her, her and her web designer who kept going back and forth, and a couple of other people that she had looking at it that weren't even customers. And so, you know, like, for instance, like in our group, we have this program called laying the foundation, which I just mentioned, we also have our momentum program, which is our coaching program. We have a group coaching program and a one on one coaching program. And in those groups, you know, like we share, like when someone is launching a website, we share it and so like, let's say there's 100 members in the program who are actively supporting the other members in the program. And all let's say all those members went to go look at the website, well, that would show up as 100 unique visitors. But those aren't 100 people who are actually interested in buying their product. 

And so I see this happening a lot, because that's exactly what this person did. It was like a combination of her and her web designer and like friends of hers looking at her website and saying, Oh, this is great. But it wasn't really the kind of traffic that she was trying to get. And so I wanted to dial that down. Because I know for people who are a little bit more in the newbie stage, especially when it comes to e-commerce and online sales, and I sometimes batch those two together because I'm a custom jewelry designer. And I consider what I do online sales as opposed to e commerce but for if you have a shopping cart on your site, you're selling e commerce. You might also be doing a combination of both because you might have virtual trunk shows or you might have online events, or you might be selling in a Facebook group or on Facebook or you might also sell on social media.

So there's A lot of ways to sell your jewelry online these days. Typically when I talk about online sales, and e commerce, it's a combination of those methods. But it's always directed back to your, your own website, your branded website. I don't coach people on selling on Etsy, because that's not there's a bunch of people who do that. And I also don't think that that's the best first mode if you're spending all your attention and time optimizing your Etsy site, in my opinion, you're wasting time because at any given moment, you could lose your business. And I've seen it happen over and over again. So I always encourage people, even if they're selling on Etsy as a second form, to focus on getting people on their own branded website. And this is the case for anyone I know that any of you who have done, built your business around in person shows pop ups, pop up events, or wholesale. 

You are feeling the pain this year because I guarantee you that many of you maybe not all of you, but many of you might have had canceled orders. I know that most of the people who had in person events had canceled them. Since, at least here in the United States, I don't know about other areas in the world. So you're probably feeling a little bit of pain and because your sales streams have been cut off. And so for the last two years, I've been talking about the importance of building a high converting website, building your email list, getting people back onto your website to sell products, and building your audience so that you can do this, this cycle of attracting the right customers, getting those customers to buy, keeping the best customers to sell to over time again and again. So getting those repeat customers and scaling that for the long haul because honestly, that's the methodology and the desired brand effect in a nutshell. And if you don't do this, the reason why that desire brand effect methodology and system works so well is because it is trying to true for any stage in business.

It doesn't matter if you're just starting out. It doesn't matter if you kind of have a business that's rolling and you're trying to grow and also doesn't matter if you're scaling those three things. always need to happen. You need to attract new customers, to get those people who bought from you once to buy from you again. And you need to scale those results. And there's a system involved in that. And we talk a little. I'll talk a little bit more about that in the supercharger sales masterclass, so make sure that you register for that. But it's a tried and true principle. It always works. And we share with you our way of doing it. And we've helped over 7500 brands in the last eight years do this really well. So I'm very excited to continue helping more people. Hopefully by the end of this year, we will have helped over 9000 brands, and I look forward to helping you increase your results and get a better impact from the activities that you're doing. So back to these three success metrics. 

The reason why this was super important is because I'm tired of seeing people do a bunch of work. And number one, not measure what they're doing. Number two, not really knowing if like If you do it being on Instagram is actually a good method for them, or is Facebook a good method or Pinterest or whatever? Because I hear people say all the time, like most of my customers come from Instagram. Well, if you don't know, if you're not actually selling on, it's on the Instagram platform. Like, how would you know that unless you're tracking it somehow. So I have seen a lot of people are making assumptions, they're not actually measuring it. 

So I wanted to make sure that people were understanding where their sales are actually coming from, have a clear understanding of the platforms that are working for them so that they can focus on the ones that give them the most, the most leverage, I guess, is the best way to put it. And then to go deeper into that. So that's kind of where we're going to start with and that all starts with tracking what's happening. And so you need strong analytics on your site. So we recommend Google Analytics. I believe that Shopify has another sort of analytic platform where they have Google Analytics for Shopify, so if you are a shop By customer and you have a Shopify website, which I highly recommend, if you don't have a Shopify website, Flourish and Thrive has a free trial. I'm gonna post it in the show notes. And you can get that over at flourishthrive academy.com/Shopify.

And check out that free trial, you get like a couple of weeks for free, and highly recommend that you move your website over to Shopify, because of the functionality trust me on that. Anyway, so you want to be measuring your analytics. And you want to make sure that you have custom tracking in your analytics so you can see where your traffic is coming from. So let's talk about these three key metrics. Well, the first metric I've been talking about all along, which is traffic. So when you're selling online, you know, I've talked a lot about like, is more traffic really the most important thing? Well, at a certain point, yes, and the best traffic and we're going to talk about this later is really your own marketing or email marketing of previous customers Mark targeting them. 

However, In the beginning, when you don't have any customers, you need to somehow get traffic to your site. Now, as opposed to other consumer products, I feel like jewelry and creative product brands or aspirational product brands, things that require a bigger messaging and connection with your customers. Like we're not selling $5 Kids shoes, or random widgets that are like super fast and an easy purchase because it's a low price point. Typically the people that we help over here at Flourish and Thrive Academy are selling merchandise or things that require a story. It's not just like, you know, throw away product. And that's why in the desire brand effect methodology that we teach, and help you implement. It's really important that like part of your branding and your brand story and the messaging, those are really key points to delivering a better experience and to getting more customers and connecting with them online and off and so that is a huge part of what we show you to do. 

And if you ever learned from other mentors They're going to tell you a lot of different things, they're going to start just with traffic only. But the thing that's different about jewelry and creative product brands is that you need a lot more than that. Because jewelry is such a personal decision. It's really about desire. And it's that connection piece that allows someone to switch that flip in someone's mind. Yes, I want to buy this. This is for me. It's so different from other products that, you know, part of the reason why we started with only jewelry here at Flourish and Thrive Academy  was for that exact reason because it is a really unique thing. It's very different from other consumer ecommerce products that you might be selling. 

So the first metric that you need to be measuring is the traffic to your website. So let's talk about what it would take to get one sale a day on your website. So we know that a normal ecommerce website conversion is about 1% for cold traffic and cold traffic is anyone who's never experienced your brand or bought from you before. So if you're getting traffic, you would need 100 visitors a day. Let's do the simple math to get one sale. And that adds up to 3000 on a 30 day month, 3000 visitors a month or 3100 visitors a month, if you had a 31 day month. So that is like the first thing that we're actually really looking for is to get 100 people to your website, every single day. And these are unique visitors. And if you do that, you will likely get one sale so we can get traffic and a lot of ways you can get a lot of traffic for free. You know, social media is great if you're using social media properly, and you're building your audience, Instagram, Facebook, all of these places are great ways to get traffic, SEO. 

So if you start ranking in search, that's another great way. That's why we recommend blogging so much for jewelry and creative product brands. Because if you can pick up keywords and you're coming up in searches, especially in your local area, which is the most important part because I feel like that's where you can really win SEO. If you're like showing up for local search. You can start ranking and people can start finding you more. As a local jeweler or local jewelry designer, Pinterest is another great way or any other social kind of platform, word of mouth marketing. So this might be your grassroots marketing or people sharing what you're doing. And then also email marketing. Of course, that's sort of the third metric too, but we're going to talk about that a little bit later. You can also get paid traffic to your site.

And this is all the advertising you do. It might be Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Pinterest, ads, YouTube, Google all those things. So there's a lot of ways to get traffic to your site. What I always recommend you doing in the beginning unless you have a lot of budget is to start just with the free traffic until you start making some headway and making some sales. So you need 100 visitors unique visitors, not all your friends. These are people that don't know you and are just visiting your site because they like you a unique visitors on your site a day to get one sale. So the next step of this is really thinking about what we call it sharing desire and this is about converting those prospects that people who are actually going to the audience that you're attracting to your website, that conversion piece is really about getting those people into customers. And this is the third phase of what's called the buyer journey.

Now, I don't want to confuse you with too many concepts. But this is like a standard, you could just Google that, like, what's a customer journey looked like it would be that they first encounter your brand they get to know you, then they create, you create a connection with them, so that they get to like you. And then they trust you this is a could also be phases of awareness, like unaware, somewhat aware, very aware. So know like trust. And then once you build that trust, that's when they convert into a buyer. And once they buy from you, your job is to keep them loyal customers. So that's the conversion piece. 

There is an intersection here of getting someone to buy from you once and then also to buy from you a second time and that's how you can scale your sales. So of that traffic that you get to your website. So let's say you have 100 100 visitors to your website a day of those you know you're doing a good job with the conversion. If four people add something to the shopping cart, of those four people, if you get to the checkout page, you're doing a good job. And if one of those people actually buys, you're doing a great job. And so if that's not working, then you need to kind of look at like, what your experience is like and improve that. Now, one of the reasons why abandoned cart sequences work so well from an automated sequence is that like, if you think about it, if three people filled out a cart, and you're able to market to two who didn't buy, and you're recapturing, 30% of those people, like every couple of days, you're going to get an extra sale that you normally wouldn't have. So, I want you to keep that metric in mind as you're looking at these things. 

And, you know, we offer a lot of help over here at Flourish and Thrive because I know this is like high level stuff. Okay, so you're, you're telling me what to do Tracy, but like, how do I actually do that? You know, we're gonna join me on the supercharge your sales masterclass, and I'll definitely share a little bit more about how to do that. So the second metric is really conversion rates and that's what we call a new desire brand, effectively. Sharing desire. And a third metric is really being able to scale that conversion into building a system of repeat customers, and owning those buyers. And what I mean by owning those buyers, it's called a lot of different things. I've heard it called own marketing, I heard it called, you know, building a Cust customer loyalty and all those things, we kind of target that more in the customer loyalty segment, because like, ultimately, what you're trying to do is to create true fans that stick with you for life by delivering a great experience. So there's a lot more involved than just like email marketing for these people. 

And a lot of that comes to your email list, though, like building an email list, getting the people who bought from you on that email list and getting them to buy from you again. So there's ways to do that with automated sequences, win back campaigns for someone who's already purchased from you once. And there's a lot of different things that it's called, but we'll just call it for now a win back campaign. That's basically when you send an automated sequence to people who've already bought from you before to encourage them to buy from you again. But if they're just on your email list, you can also send broadcast emails. But as we get into more advanced marketing in more detail orientation, like we're trying to actually get, segment our email list in a way that we're getting a better result so that we're not emailing just broadcasts all the time so that we know the difference between the people who've never purchased from us versus the ones who bought from us once versus the ones who bought from us multiple times. 

Like we want to segment all those things into different segments so that we can continue to target the people who actually like to hear from us more because they will buy over and over again. For instance, there's this company they're called lively and I don't know them. This is a little bit of personal information. So sorry if this is TMI, but they offer wallets for women with larger size best. I'm not going to share my bra size or anything like that, but I've always had a hard time with wallets. It doesn't they don't really work. I have a small ribcage and larger breasts so sorry. TMI guys if you're watching, sorry about that. And I've really struggled with this, and it was something that I wanted to find.

So I bought, they said that they claim that they're really good at this, I bought a couple of their bras, they're really inexpensive. And I have to tell you that I love the way that they fit. And they were super comfortable. I have now purchased probably 10 of their bras in one year. And I found them on a Facebook ad. So this the reason why it's so well is they are targeting me all the time I get literally daily text messages from them. And I could easily unsubscribe because I don't really care about getting them I know if I want another rug just gonna go find their website and do it. But I'm just fascinated by the way that they're marketing. I get a text message from them every day. If I go on their website from one of the text messages, they come back 15 minutes later and send me another message saying oh, you forgot to actually check out with this. Come back. Like there's so many things that you can do in order to like them and they have a really good ecommerce retailer. That campaign sequence and they know that I've purchased certain things.

So I'm getting targeted with those certain things in the new colors or in the size that I wear or whatever. So these are really important things to think about. This is not something this is not the place to start. But it is really important. So when we're thinking about trying to win back people and get them again, in email marketing, in general, we're looking at a couple of metrics. So you want to make sure that you're improving those conversion rates from your email marketing. So if we're looking at open rates, in general, like an open rate for like a good open rate for an e commerce brand, is somewhere between 15 to 25%. The bigger your email list, the lower that open rate will go. So keep that in mind that as your company gets bigger, and as your email list gets bigger, I would say like when you have 100 people on your list, you're probably going to get a higher open rate. 

Then when you have 10 or 100,000 10,000 or 100,000 people on your list, you know, hashtag goals right? So, if you're thinking about it that way, you want to make sure that you're really looking at that. And you're measuring it based on a variety of variables. It's not just a flat number, but 15 to 25% is generally pretty good. If you're below that, you might want to take a look at your subject lines and what you're doing. If the emails that you're sending are actually getting delivered into the inbox, there's a lot of things that you can do to improve that. But we don't have time on this podcast to actually take a look at this.

And the next thing that you want to think about is the click-through rate. So that's when someone opens your email. Opening the email is the most important part. That's why subject lines are super important. That's exactly why I developed the Emails That Sell bundle. If you haven't grabbed it yet, I would highly recommend it. I'll put a link in the show notes. But it's https://www.flourishthriveacademy.com/emailbundle/. It's super inexpensive. It has many deliverables, but I think the most important thing is actually the email subject lines. I've curated 600 or more about almost 700, email subject lines that you can swipe in the edit for your brand, and plug and play that I've been collecting over the years. So that's a great place to start. I'll have a link in the show notes. But you can head on over to https://www.flourishthriveacademy.com/emailbundle/ and just grab that right there. So good open rate 15 to 25%. And then once that happens, you want your email to be focused to get the people who open it to click through.

So a good click through rate is about 3% from the entire list of the people that you're sending to. And then there's another metric – the click to open rate. And that is the percentage of people who open your email who actually click through which is 20 to 30%. So these are all things that you want to be be taking a look at and this might be actually different like a different metric if you're actually segmenting your email list from people who are calling who haven't ever purchased from you, versus the people who've only purchased once, versus the people who have purchased multiple times, and their engagement with your emails. So if someone is only opening, like has an open in 30 to 90 days, they might be more of a cold, a cold lead on your list, versus someone who has, who opens every single email that you sell.

So there's like a, or that you send, I should say. So there's a lot of things to be looking at. We're not going to go into detail about that here. And this is stuff that we train on in our momentum program. In particular, because that's really where our people are at, they've already kind of gone through the foundational aspects of building a business and they're in the stages of the growth and the scale stages of their business. So we help them with these more advanced numbers. And so just to get started, I think the most important things to be looking at are to set some goals for yourself, and then work backwards to figure out what those goals are. 

So if you have a goal of one sale a day, try to get 3000 visitors to your website a month, the email market consistently makes sure that your website's converting. If you're getting four people out of those hundred to add something to cart, you know that your website has a good user experience. If you're not getting that, then you need to take a look at the way your website is designed. And then from there, you want to take a look at basically getting people who've already purchased from you to buy again. So you're kind of segmenting this just from cold traffic, you're starting to get more warm traffic to your site with your email marketing, and you're taking a look at all these numbers.

So these success metrics are really going to help you so that's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening. Once again I am doing the supercharge of your sales masterclass. If you're trying to sell more online, or you're trying to scale your online sales, I would highly encourage you to join. There's a lot going on and even if you're not scaling your online sales, I think you'll learn a lot. You'll get a lot of value out of this masterclass. It is brand new and I'm looking forward to seeing you in class. You can head on over to https://www.flourishthriveacademy.com/supercharge-masterclass/ to register for free. We're doing it live on July 22. So I'm looking forward to seeing you there. Thank you so much for listening today.

This is Tracy Matthews signing off. But before I go, I would love to hear from you. If you have a friend in the jewelry or creative product industry, and you are enjoying this podcast, I would love for you to share this with them. You can share it on your social media, share it in a message or whatever. And if you haven't done so yet, I would be so honored if you gave us a rating and review. We have a very loyal following on this podcast, people coming in and listening every week. And I know we have thousands and thousands of downloads every week and we don't have thousands and thousands and thousands of reviews.

So if you're enjoying this, I would love for you to just give us a little review, rating, and review. You can do that right on Apple podcasts by heading on over to www.flourishthriveacademy.com/apple/ or just searching thrive by design on Apple podcasts and giving us a rating and review Helps Apple especially if you give us a five-star rating. It really helps Apple share this podcast with other people who are just like you and when I'm really on a mission to stand by my word and one of our core values over Flourish and Thrive, community and collaboration over the competition because I do you believe that as a community, a rising tide lifts all boats, and we can do so much more together than we can do alone. So thanks so much for listening today. This is Tracy Matthews, signing off.