11 Oct What is your “BASE” Line?

Upon reviewing a website for a friend, I asked him to define what exactly he wanted to do with his site.

Being a small ecommerce site owner, he instantly said to “increase sales and leads”.

My reply was, “…increase from what, measuring what indicators??”

The only key performance indicator he knew to mention was $Dollars Revenue.

The Need For a BaseLine

At my sons’ baseball games recently, there was a big emphasis by coaches of these young boys to run within the baselines.  On defense, in the field, they used the baseline as a measure of how close to the batter they should stand, ready to field a potential hit.  The baseline, normally in baseball, does not move, but does allow hits to be judged foul or fair, gives the players a solid border of the infield, and connects point Home Plate to first, second, and third bases.

In Interactive Marketing, my friend was not aware of his Baselines.  Because of this, he did not have a realistic approach to what actions he needed to take to improve his Online Sales.

In any improvement, or venture to improvement, one needs to consider where they are (baseline), in relation to where they need to be!

Consider some of the following high level measures and how they could give the real health of your ecommerce funnel:

• Level of engagement:  depends on number of visitors and the time spent on site and/or number of pages browsed.
• Targets reached:  Setting a baseline and measuring how many people are reaching that target is advantageous to your understanding of the status of your online sales.  Targets could be key pages browsed, time on site, number of pages browsed, number of minutes on chat etc.
• Number of drop-offs in sales funnel:  How many people bailed after the first steps?
• Number of contact us forms: How many people completed the forms fully?
• Number of people who clicked through to site from social media initiatives and what they did afterwards…

Your baseline is going to help you to offer engaging solutions, improve current processes, and prioritize marketing spend, R&D, and new customer account management.

Good luck in finding your Base Line!