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Insights on how your ecommerce brand should use data to develop a strategy for growth.
Many D2C eCommerce brands are born out of the minds of highly creative people. With this may come a distaste for the rigidity or confinement that the word “data” may elicit. However, a business’ data today, has become the lifeblood that offers organisational insights, innovation, and fuels informed decisions. This is to say that data can, and should be used to elevate a business to the next level. This is where the Gross Demand Plan (GDP) comes into play.
The GDP seeks to bridge the gap between eCommerce metrics and financial deliverables. And in turn gives business owners tangible weekly metrics to help you reach your targets. It does this by using a series of interconnected formulas based on the theory of three key eCommerce variables aligning themselves to deliver a profitable return: total traffic, conversion rate, and average order value.
Using these metrics, the GDP can build an actionable blueprint for true business growth. It’s a retail management tool designed to help eCommerce businesses grow, whilst ensuring that they retain their sense of agency. After all, no organisation should be 100% data-driven, but every organisation should be at least somewhat data-informed.
Evolving your brand with a structured process takes the guesswork out of growth. Having visibility on exactly what your eCommerce KPIs are, will enable you and your team to focus your efforts where they are needed most, but allows your business to retain its sense of agency over those key growth decisions. The GDP paves the roadmap with a 52 week growth plan for both your finance and marketing strategy. In turn, this tool will become your companion once those key business decisions have been made.
The end result of a business doing anything can be reduced down to three core decisions that were made along the way: Why, what, and how. Lets create an example, an eCommerce business starts promoting their product through ads on TikTok. For any informed business, there would have been a number of decisions made beforehand. Let’s say that this eCommerce business wanted to increase their revenue by 20%, they decided to invest more heavily in their marketing, and decided that paid social is the way to go. We now have a “why, what, and how” to their decision.
It is the leaders and visionaries of a business that decide why something is done, data can help inform what to do next, but the micro decisions of how something is achieved should be almost entirely data driven. This showcases how data and human vision are not just compatible, but entirely complementary.
Only you can say where you’re going to take your business because you know why you’re making the journey in the first place. This is to say that data should inform, but not solely dictate, the selection of your strategy.
Equally, as good of a vision you may have for your business, or however good of a “feeling” you may have about starting a podcast, the minutiae of how a business goal is achieved, can only be achieved using data. Numbers don’t lie, and so, they should be used to guide you towards your goals.
Once an organisation knows where it wants to go, and why it wants to go there, the turn-by-turn journey will be far more efficient if every step is laid out in front of you. This is where services, such as the GDP, can take the reins and ensure that a business stays on course. The roadmap provided by the GDP bridges the gap between finance and marketing, across the 52 weeks of a fiscal year; giving you 52 chances to evaluate your performance and targets as eCommerce variables fluctuate.
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