Shopify owners, folks like you, overlook post-BFCM analysis. They see no point analyzing their sales and performance since their pre-sales strategies fetched mouthwatering profit.
However, your store’s performance needs to be evaluated after the BFCM sales period. With this, you understand the brand’s strengths, and weaknesses and how to leverage opportunities for future success.
Stay with us as we walk you through the importance of post-BFCM analysis. We also provide a comprehensive guide on how to evaluate your Shopify store performance.
Why is Post-BFCM Analysis Important?
Post-BFCM provides valuable insights to check the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Here, are some of the key reasons why this analysis is crucial:
1. Evaluating Your Store’s Performance
Post-BFCM analysis allows you to measure the success of your sales and marketing strategies and assess your store performance before, during and after the BFCM sales. You can check for key metrics including site traffic and conversion rate.
This enables you to identify areas where you excelled and what areas need to be improved for more conversion.
2. Identify Trends
During BFCM, trending products sell more. Therefore, analyzing BFCM data helps you to identify trends and patterns in customer behavior such as the most popular products, the peak shopping times and the source of the most valuable customers. These insights are valuable for future marketing campaigns.
3. Customer Retention
Post-BFCM analysis helps you identify opportunities to retain BFCM customers as loyal long-term clients. Understanding their preferences and shopping patterns allows you to craft targeted retention strategies.
The success of your analysis lies in identifying and measuring the key performance metrics for BFCM sales and how to measure them effectively. Right now, we will discuss the importance of these performance metrics.
Defining Your Key Performance Metrics for BFCM Sales
Businesses use performance metrics to measure how the company is achieving its business objectives and goals. For BFCM, these metrics are data that are used to track the business process over a period. They focus on sales activities, productivity and employee behavior.
Although these performance indicators measure the overall objectives of a business, they differ depending on the type of business and industry. For example, businesses that rely on marketing, SEO, or social media use different performance indicators when compared to businesses in retail or pharmaceuticals.
Why is it important to identify specific measures to track?
There are various performance metrics to track. Trying to track all of them at the same time could distract you from the necessary metrics you need to achieve to achieve a specific goal.
Therefore, it is crucial to identify the specific metrics you need at a certain time to achieve the objective and goals of the business within a specified period.
Now, let’s look at some of the common e-commerce KPIs. They include:
- Sales Conversion Rate – This metric measures the percentage of visitors who made purchases in your store from those who visited your store during BFCM. A higher conversion rate shows your e-commerce store is performing exceptionally well as more people are engaging with your site during this period.
- Average Order Value – This value shows you the amount customers spend per order. This is an important metric to predict your customer’s buying habits and sales performance.
- Customer Acquisition Cost – This value measures the cost of acquiring a new customer. It includes the money spent on marketing, adverts and overall sales expenses.
- Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) – This measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
- Cart Abandonment Rate – this metric measures the percentage of shoppers who add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase.
- Customer Lifetime Value – This value shows the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your store.
Once you’ve measured your KPIs, you want to analyze your sales and revenue to check if your sales target was achieved, and if your strategy can be revised.
Analyzing Sales and Revenue
To analyze your BFCM sales data, review these aspects of your sales flow:
- Profit – Sales Profits are the total revenue your store generates from BFCM sales. To measure your profit accurately, don’t stop at measuring the differences between revenue and capital.
Check if your profit margin went up from the previous year. Check too to see if your sales increased and if that translates to a boost in profit.
- Product – Another metric to pay attention to during post-BFCM sales analysis is your product performance. You need to find out the popular product(s) with high profits, why it was mostly in demand during sales and what may have affected the sales of other products.
Could it be that the products were more advertised than the others? Or does the price range seem fairer when compared to other less-demanded products? Another thing to note is the percentage of sales from discounted items. For example, if shoppers must spend up to $80 to qualify for free shipping, you may find that 25% of items on free shipment were not discounted. Customers purchased them to qualify which adds up to the total sales. This insight will be helpful for future promotions to help pair the right products together.
- Channels – Sales channels are an important metric for BFCM sales analysis. You’ll need to identify the channels with the most sales. Ask: is the cost of advertising on each channel proportional to the profit acquired from that channel? For example, Google Ads and social media ads require more resources than email marketing. They should generate more sales from Google and social media promotions.
However, if your email marketing has driven the highest sales, then you need to strategize your marketing plan to be more effective.
- Promotions – According to the shopper insight, 40% of shoppers claim to join black Friday sales because of free shipping while 58% of them are motivated to buy at least 50% Black Friday discounts. Knowing your best-performing promotion can help you in planning future promotions.
However, factors such as timing and product can affect the result. Be meticulous when planning your promotions. Running different promotions at intervals will help you understand what works best for your store.
- Customer Acquisition – BFCM sales attract new shoppers to your shop which in turn increases sales, but what becomes of them after sales? Are they just one-off customers or have they become regular customers?
Most buyers linger until Black Fridays to shop and never return to your store. Some shop on impulse, regret those items and return them after sales. Assess the value of your BFCM customers after the sales have ended to know if your conversion rate is higher than the cost of acquiring each customer.
Analyze Customer Behavior
Customer Behavior during the BFCM sales is another important analysis to evaluate for your Shopify store.
- Click-Through Rate – You’ll need to analyze the number of shoppers who clicked through your ad campaign. A higher click-through rate shows that your ad campaign resonates with more online shoppers.
- Page View – Compare the number of shoppers on your page during the BFCM sales to people who view your page outside the sales period. This will give you insights into the number of customers you acquired during the sales period.
- Peak Shopping Time – Determine the peak shopping times during BFCM. Were there specific days or hours when your website experienced the highest traffic and conversions? Use this data for future sales events.
- Session Duration – Determine if you recorded higher session durations during sales. Compare the amount of time your customer spent in your store during sales to other times. More session duration translates to more sales.
- Cart Abandonment – Check the number of abandoned carts during sales. Find out why those carts were abandoned. Could it be issues with the checkout process or customer negligence to complete their shopping process? Identifying the underlying issues will help you minimize the number of abandoned carts.
- Customer Segmentation – Segment your customers into different groups based on behavior and demographics. Analyze the purchasing patterns, preferences and lifetime value of each segment.
- Customer Feedback – Collect and review customer feedback and reviews. What are the common praises and complaints? Use this input to address any issues and enhance your offerings.
Inventory Management
Effective inventory management is essential to the post-BFCM analysis process. Here is how you should evaluate it:
- Stock Level – Compare your initial inventory levels with the stock remaining after BFCM. Identify the products that sold out quickly and those that didn’t move. Use this data to effectively pair products for your future sales.
- Slow-Moving Inventory – Since BFCM is one of the biggest online sales, identifying the slow-moving products can help you make decisions on whether to completely take them off your store or come up with strategies to help sell these products such as discounts and bundles.
- Stock Turnover – Did you sell twice more pajamas than you would over a weekend? That’s a high stock turnover. Knowing your turnover rate will guide your restocking decisions.
Tips for Restocking Your Inventory Following BFCM Sales.
- Use an inventory management system to monitor and manage your inventory levels, orders and product information.
- Build solid relationships with your suppliers and communicate with them regularly and ensure they communicate their availability and lead time properly to prevent out-of-stock.
- Implement a Just in Time approach – JIT approach ensures you have just the right amount of inventories to be delivered. This is particularly helpful if you don’t have a lot of storage space.
- Carry out inventory audits – Inventory audits mean taking physical records of your stock and comparing them with your digital records. These management practices help to identify any discrepancies or errors and provide insight into your inventory turnover rate.
Conclusion
Post-BFCM analysis is important for the success of your Shopify business. Understanding the importance and proper steps to take in evaluating your store’s performance will give you insightful data that will help you restrategize for future sales and the overall success of your business.
