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Basic Benchmarks for World Class Businesses

Written by: Michael Reining

Article Overview: Incremental improvement is the single fastest way to drive revenue. Study the Toyota way. How did they become a world-class car manufacturer? Toyota does this: continuous improvement. They benchmark. They measure. They fix. They improve. If I asked you right now, “What is your shopping cart abandonment rate,” would you be able to answer? In 30 seconds? If not, that is really bad because this is how you make your money. There are 2 mind shifts we’re really pushing towards. i. Think like a marketer in everything business-related ii. Measure everything –you need to know the metrics of your business

Basic Benchmarks for World Class Businesses

There are several key learnings we’ve been emphasizing lately, and 2 mind shifts we’re really pushing towards.

i. Think like a marketer in everything business-related

ii. Measure everything –you need to know the metrics of your business

Today, I’m going into deeper discussion on the second point, measurements.

We are starting measure a lot more, and it is really powerful.

Every industry does this –it’s called benchmarking. We are now finally in a position to start doing that internally, and that is going to dramatically accelerate our success.

If I asked you right now, “What is your shopping cart abandonment rate,” would you be able to answer? In 30 seconds?

If not, that is really bad because this is how you make your money.

The beauty of benchmarking is this: when you have several different websites, on all of them people start out on step one of the buying process. But, you have to know how many people who get to the check out actually make it to the ‘Thank You’ page.

Why? Because it’s crazy not to! This is a very important statistic you need to know, so you want to know if your checkout is world class.

What is your shopping cart abandonment rate?

10%? 20%? Or 50%? Do 10% or 50% of people on that particular website complete the checkout? If you have 4 websites, can you tell in 30seconds which is doing better than the rest?

Even if you have that data available ’somewhere’, that doesn’t really count because it must be easily accessible. If it takes 10minutes and is a painful, painstaking process, people won’t check on those figures.

Is it worth getting something that takes 3minutes down to 10seconds? YES.

Because if not, you never check the data because there is resistance. You won’t know for a long time if your checkout is broken on Internet Explorer 6.0, for example.

If you had this data at hand, you could check all the time and instantly see if there was a problem, if your sales suddenly dropped to 10% from an average of 50%. You could see that you have a problem on a particular website, and then you could go in and fix it. It’s easy to do. That is what I mean by world class benchmarking.

If you knew all this important information instantly, you could also add industry averages to your equations. Or maybe you would just know that the industry shopping cart abandonment rate is 50%, and you would then analyze and instantly know how your business is doing.

The fact is, any time that it’s hard to get data, you get lazy. But, if you don’t do this, your checkout can be broken for three months and you wouldn’t know it. Doing it manually is just not good enough.

If it’s not easy and effortless, people just don’t do it. And if people don’t do it, you don’t know if you’re world class.

Lesson consumption.

Without a little more effort, you can probably track this way better than you are doing right now. You want to be able to know if you are world class in email deliverability and/or in email copywriting.

* Look at the percentage of people you email.
* You want to be able to instantly see which website is doing well, and which isn’t.
* When you know those figures, that is cool. ‘Not cool’ is not having any idea at all.

On which of your sites is Lesson 1 working better, A or B?

And what does ‘good’ even mean in relation to all these?

When you have these answers, you can immediately improve your business. You want to be able to see all these facts and make the comparisons. Only such analytics can quickly tell you if your checkout really is working or if you need to improve your emails for any one of your websites.

Benchmarking is a very powerful tool to have at your fingertips, especially when you launch new businesses. When you can just go straight in and see these graphs, it can be crazy powerful stuff.

Another thing that could potentially be tested with foresight is your auto-responder. Perhaps you have always had the hypothesis that email deliverability is better on one provider than another –and maybe you’ve never checked it because of lack of proper data.

When you make all of your money via email, imagine if emails from A get read 25% more times than emails from B. Which would you want to use? By making the right choice after testing and measuring, your whole business would grow in revenue and profit overnight.

That is the power of collecting these numbers.

World-class benchmarking and world-class measuring will sky-rocket your innovation because when you have this data in front of you, the moment you compare and see a drastic difference you will take action.

Incremental improvement is the single fastest way to drive revenue.

Study the Toyota way.

How did they become a world-class car manufacturer? Toyota does this: continuous improvement.

With Kaizen and all the other systems they have put in place, this is what they do:

* They benchmark.
* They measure.
* They improve.
* They fix.

Now, online measurement is really hard –-a lot of the time, you don’t get Google analytics and your E-commerce figures to sync. The good thing is though, it doesn’t matter when you benchmark because the same floor applies to all of them.

This kind of benchmarking will help you to very rapidly move ahead.

Other core questions...

How long does it take people to buy from your websites, after they have signed up? Is it one day? 3 days? 8, 21, 30?
What are the figures by website?

You may not know the answer today but imagine knowing that people from Website A buy after 4 days, from Website B buy after 21 days, etc. Again, measuring shows you the power and effectiveness of which site is better at getting customers to buy.

Benchmarking like a world-class business will really take you to the next level and can be game changing for your business when you have to right data on which to take action. How are you measuring?

Read This Article (and More) HERE:
http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/basic-benchmarks-for-world-class-businesses/429/

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Article Tags: better than the rest, business today, checkout, explorer 6 0, internet explorer, learnings, long time, marketer, metrics, money, point measurements, resistance, shopping cart abandonment, statistic



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