From Good to Great: 6 Questions to Propel Your Brand to Success

Explore six key questions ecommerce founders & operators should ask themselves and how to unlock answers, in an instant.
April 12, 2023
by
Rachel Cantor
Gradient background with questions you should be asking about your business

How do you take your brand from being just good to truly great? The answer lies in asking the right questions and leveraging your data to propel your brand forward. 

What are those questions? In this blog post, we’ll explore six questions that can unlock new opportunities and supercharge growth. Whether you’re just starting a brand or you’re growing quickly, these questions will provide you with valuable insights to level up. So, let’s dive in and discover how to propel your brand to success! 

Which 3 products are purchased most frequently as a first purchase? Second? Third purchase? 

Understanding product purchase path is critical as it allows you to optimize the customer journey and improve the overall experience. Additionally, understanding which products are better suited for acquisition vs. retention helps you create stronger, and more targeted marketing strategies. 

Actions you can take with your calculated answer:

Build landing pages around your top-performing, first-purchase product.

Yuxin Zhu, cofounder of Replo says, “Landing pages are becoming a relatively easy lever to pull in terms of driving that storytelling of who you are, or what your brand is, and getting that sale.”

Create email flows to push 2nd and 3rd-time prospective buyers towards top-performing 2nd and 3rd purchase products.

“A repeat purchaser does not need the same initial messaging about your brand history, how you produce your products, and who you are as a team,” says Val Geisler. “That’s the kind of messaging that goes to a first-time purchaser.” 

Answer this question

Is my business seasonal? What are my top 2 months for sales? What are my bottom 2 months for sales? 

Want to stay ahead of the competition? It’s helpful to have a deep understanding of how promotions and seasonality can impact your business. Promotions help attract new customers while also retaining existing ones. Seasonality highlights buying preferences and customer behaviors. Analyzing both can lead to smarter decisions around marketing, inventory, promotion planning, and more. 

Actions you can take with your calculated answer:

  1. Increase your ad spend to amplify top-performing months.
  2. Run promotions to offset bottom-performing months. 
  3. Launch new products to offset bottom-performing months.

Answer this question

What percent of my customers have only purchased on discount? 

Understanding customer behavior is one of the most important parts of an ecommerce business. To better understand customer behavior and leverage this data, you need to focus efforts on segmentation. Using segmentation, you can personalize your marketing messages, which leads to increased revenue and retention. 

Actions you can take with your calculated answer:

  1. Provide discounts to low LTV shoppers while optimizing for those who are willing to pay full price. 
  2. Adjust your promotions strategy. 

Answer this question

On average, how long until my subscription customers churn?

Leverage and optimize subscriptions! Why? They increase customer engagement and retention. Plus, they’re an acquisition tool. If you already have a subscription program in place, you’ll want to optimize it to find untapped potential, areas and improvement, and effective strategies to decrease churn. 

Actions you can take with your calculated answer:

  1. Implement subscriber retention incentives into email flows. 
  2. Conduct interviews with churned subscribers to improve your subscription program. 

Answer this question

What’s my blended new customer acquisition cost?

Are you focused on customer acquisition? If yes, then you’ll want to keep a close eye on your new blended CAC (customer acquisition cost)

Actions you can take with your calculated answer:

  1. Determine your break-even CAC to inform whether or not you can increase your paid media spend. 
  2. Increase your payback period to allow for more breathing room with CAC. 

Answer this question

What are my unit economics? On average, how much am I making on a single order?

Maximizing profitability should be your #1 goal as a business operator or founder. How? Keep generating revenue that surpasses your marketing and operating costs. Ask yourself the question above to ensure you’re on the path toward profitability. 

Actions you can take with your calculated answer:

  1. Adjust your KPIs with your paid media team. 
  2. Decrease vendor costs. 

Answer this question

Want to answer these questions? Here’s how: 

Taking your brand from good to great requires strategic thinking, innovation, and continuous improvement. By answering the six questions we have presented, you can better understand your brand's strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth. 

How can you answer these questions? 

You can dive sign up for Tydo’s free Platform and use our Questions feature, where you can answer these questions with the click of a button. It’s as easy as that. Sign up here

Get started

Looking for a more custom data solution? 

Check out Tydo Custom here. Get paired with one of our on-demand data analysts, and we'll build you a fully custom dashboard.

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Checkout our roundup to learn:
  • What to pledge
  • How to improve
  • Which tools will set you up for success

Dale Wilson

Partnerships Manager,
adQuadrant
Resolution

I think the most important thing brands can do in 2023 is to better manage their customer data—both ethically and effectively. There’s an opportunity for brands to know their customers better than ever before—a clear benefit for both the customer and the brand. When you manage your data correctly, you’ll create stronger and more personalized ads, creative, site experiences, and so much more.

Tip

This is a classic: Let the data guide you. Go where the buyers for your products are and communicate with them on a personal level (i.e. by persona and funnel position) and nurture those relationships (past, present, and future customers). It’s possible—all through data.

Tool

It's an honest tie between Gorgias and Klaviyo. Both tools have amazing plans for 2023 and beyond, and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact both have on their clients this year.

Shawn Khemsurov

Co-founder,
Electric Eye
Resolution

We recommend that Shopify brands analyze and update their websites using data-driven decisions. Using analytics tools such as heatmaps and scrollmaps can help brands better understand how customers are interacting with their store.

Tip

Store owners tend to make assumptions about the way customers interact with their website. Most never go back and analyze their design choices to find pain points or areas of opportunity. By using heatmaps and scrollmaps, they can see where real customers are clicking and concentrating their attention. Leveraging this data, brands can start to iterate on design and make their online store experience streamlined and intuitive.

Tool

Hotjar provides a simple way to implement heatmaps, scrollmaps, and recorded user sessions on your site, helping you acquire incredibly informative user data. Additionally, it gives you the ability to create on-site surveys, which allows you to obtain direct and often critical feedback from users about their experience.

Katelyn Glass

Founder and CEO,
Fifty Six
Resolution

Test various attribution models and analyze the impact on your business. At Fifty Six, we are always here to help our clients identify and optimize their approach—a critical step in any successful marketing strategy.

Tip

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times–Customer Lifetime Value. And even more importantly, Future Lifetime Value (FLTV). With the ever-growing importance of first-party data, it is crucial that brands take a good look at their CRM and FLTV metrics.

Tool

OrderlyEmails is our go-to tool for transactional emails. It helps us level up our brands’ email aesthetics with customizable, quick-to-implement Shopify templates.

Lately, I’ve been really interested in Smile.io’s loyalty platform. Their UX is fantastic for teams with low bandwidth!

Tom Rees

Founder,
WIRO
Resolution

Stop allocating budgets to low-hanging fruit that doesn’t move the needle on conversion. Think about what’s really going to improve your CX and the return of undertaking different initiatives—not just on what’s top on your list of bugbears on the site!

Tip

One of the best ways to understand your customer behavior is by using HotJar. Their heat-mapping and screen recording tools shine a light on where customers are navigating to and from on your site, where they're rage clicking and experiencing frustration, and where conversion is dropping off within real life customer journeys and flows!

Understanding your customers’ pain points via data and analytics , will allow you to work with your CRO/CX Agency to solve customer frustrations and improve conversion.

Tool

Rewind backs up all product, customer, and order data for Shopify sites—essential since Shopify itself doesn’t provide this solution. It's saved so many of our clients time and money from administrative accidents.

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Jimmy Aristizabal

Partnership Manager,
TalentPop
Resolution

33% of customer service inquiries are pre-sale questions. What does this mean? If you’re not investing in customer service, you’re missing out on revenue-generating opportunities.

Tip

The benefits of elevating your customer experience:

  • 10% to 25% increase in AOV for customers who engage with live chat pre-purchase
  • 21x higher conversion rate for customers who reach out via Live Chat or SMS compared to other site visitors
  • 87% of customers who have a great customer experience will make another purchase
  • 72% of customers share positive experiences with 6 or more individuals
Tool

Gorgias is our favorite Helpdesk platform. They can reduce costs by 35%, primarily by decreasing the average ticket handle time. Their machine learning algorithms are trained on millions of ecommerce-related interactions across Gorgias’ customer base and provide accurate, automated replies for the most common ecommerce inquiries. This helps our agents resolve tickets faster, which provides the customer a seamless experience.

Jessica Grossman

Founder and CEO,
In Social
Resolution

Trust your agency! Agencies do the same things across multiple brands and niches, so we see the trends and have the practice and experience!

Tip

Don't be afraid of data and insights. If customers aren't clicking on your emails, try a new CTA. If your ads are driving good metrics at a small spend, start scaling. If your customers are complaining about a product, look into QA! If the data tells you something isn't working, let it go and try something else!

Tool

I'm supposed to say Tydo, right? 😉

Rikin Diwan

Chief Growth Officer,
soona
Resolution

Double down on differentiation. There will be a lot of headwinds this year and standing out from the crowd will set you apart.

Tip

A picture is worth 1,000 words. A video? Probably millions. In ecommerce that value translates into engagement, acquisition, and retention—everything you need to impact your bottom line.

At soona, we've seen the we've seen the impact of creative and the continuous split testing of it yield results. Our resolution is to challenge ourselves and double down on innovation and creative optionality so that each brand we work with can distinguish themselves in a crowded sea of D2C ecomm. We'd love to see our brands share this resolution and keep pushing the creative limits.

Tool

Klaviyo. We're using it to power our email and newsletter at soona too!

Shayna Silvers

Director of Marketing Strategy,
Absolute Web
Resolution

Optimize your returns strategy! This can lead to valuable customer insights, enhanced user experiences, and increased revenue and customer loyalty.

Tip

Brands need to dive deeper into understanding their customers to set themselves up for success. Conduct research to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. By doing so, you can develop targeted strategies that will enhance customer experience and boost overall retention.

Tool

Right now I would say Gorgias. Having a good customer service tool is crucial to building strong customer relationships.

Wes Buckwalter

Resolution

Start paying heavy attention to data, specifically around retention. We see a lot of effort put towards acquisition with the assumption that once someone buys, they are your customer forever. Instead, get to know your customer, understand their needs, and analyze their behaviors once they are on-site and judge their sentiment after they have visited. Work with a retention focused and data-driven agency to implement tools that contribute to repeat business and customer delight. It will pay dividends.

Tip

When surveyed, about 80% of ecommerce merchants think that they are delivering a great experience to their customers. However, when the same customers are surveyed, only 8% of those customers think that they are getting a great experience from the merchant. Now, more than ever, retaining loyal customers is an essential part of any online business and you should spend time with your customers to judge their experience with your website and products and offer improvements based on that feedback.

Tool

Tydo's report cards are an essential tool, along with Klaviyo for email and SMS, Recharge for subscriptions and memberships, Okendo for reviews and surveys, Rebuy for AI driven collections and upsells, Loop for self service returns... each tool is great on their own, but their strength as the ultimate tool comes from when they are used together!

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Report Cards

Free

Report Cards is a customized glimpse into your business, delivered to your inbox for free.

Report Cards consolidates all your key metrics across platforms for an at-a-glance pulse of your business.

Discover metrics for every team member so they can stay updated with the right data on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

It's free because we believe everyone should have access to the basics.

Learn more
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Portfolio

Portfolio is a hub for analytics across multiple Shopify stores. The perfect tool for agencies.

See an aggregate view of all your data for all your stores in one place.

Make real time assessments on marketing initiatives across every storefront you manage.

Analyze the performance of one store versus another in seconds.

Learn more
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