It’s especially tricky to adapt to consumers’ shifting shopping behaviours while we’re in a pandemic — customers are looking for the right value, quality and price, and only now have we seen a slight increase in consumer confidence. This unpredictable situation means retailers need to be doing everything they can to stay on the pulse of consumer habits, changing short term goals while keeping focus on achieving long term objectives in order to increase revenue.

And this can be made easier with the use of the right AI tools to help you gain visibility over your company performance, break down departmental silos and align to an overarching strategy. This article will provide you with quick wins to help you increase revenue.

Gain greater visibility over your company performance

Online retailers must prioritise having clear visibility over product performance — looking at what’s selling, what’s not and what seasonal trends are occurring.

Once you have an overarching understanding of this, you can then push the products that are performing well, while discounting or cutting back on marketing spend on those that aren’t.

However, the problem for many retailers is that they don’t have access to their product performance — traditional reporting software doesn’t provide this level of granularity, and nor does Google Shopping, so getting SKU level data or granular campaign data is tricky. So your products could be sitting in ineffective campaigns (and in a warehouse for months that you’re paying rent on!) and not selling when a different strategy could be implemented that would shift the products and increas revenue.

Short term wins: Use software to gain product level visibility

Retailers should invest in the right software that will collate their data and provide them with visibility over their product performance — the only tool that allows retailers to truly understand their digital performance on Google Shopping is Upp. They can then use this data to make adjustments to increase revenue by focusing on stocking/restocking best sellers, restructuring campaigns and pushing marketing spend on those that are the best performing (and removing products from campaigns that aren’t selling or applying discounting strategies where necessary e.g. to shift old stock).

Many retailers are currently using reporting tools that provide performance information, but this data isn’t actionable. It also doesn’t allow retailers to prioritise and segment campaigns in a way that’s aligned around the company’s goals. The right software will also use your data to provide actionable insights that can be easily executed with the click of a button, helping you shape your ecommerce strategy in order to increase revenue and improve margins.

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The long term goal achieved…

By using AI-driven software to better understand your product performance on a granular level, you can more accurately decide where to focus spend, and in turn, increase revenue, resulting in positive margins as spend isn’t being wasted.

Ensure campaigns are consistently successful

It’s vital that the campaigns you set up perform consistently well. Retailers who don’t have access to their campaign performance data can’t accurately see what’s performing well and what’s not. This also means they can’t accurately reevaluate and ensure their marketing spend is going to the right places, based on the metrics that they’re measuring success with.

The most successful companies that are able to generate revenue and long term success are the ones that have a clear understanding of Business metrics while still understanding their own teams’ departmental metrics. Marketing teams may be so heavily invested in ROAS metrics, that they fail to see the bigger picture. With limited visibility, digital marketing teams may face issues such as:

  • Overstocking or understocking — the marketing team may be pushing spend on a best selling product they don’t have stock of while the buying/merchandising team have no plans in place to restock it (because they don’t have the data available).
  • Marketing spend is going to the wrong place — e.g. heavily pushing marketing spend on underperforming products without realising.
  • Products in negative margin — products may be placed in ineffective campaigns and digital teams can’t view this data to correct it.

Short-term wins: Make communication between departments easy

These kinds of issues occur because teams lack software like Upp provides, which not only provides performance data at a granular level, but also allows teams to ensure their marketing spend is going to the right places. This maximises revenue for the short term and sets you up to meet your long term goals.

The long term goals achieved…

Using the right AI software (rather than just traditional reporting software) can ensure the revenue and margin goals of the company are being met overall, which is vital to achieving the increased profits you need.

Align your goals to an overarching strategy

As we have just discussed, breaking down data silos can ensure that departments are working towards the same goal. But how do you set those goals and implement an overarching strategy that will drive revenue growth?

Companies must have overarching goals that every department is aware of and working towards.  This involves setting out the goals and how this progress will be measured with the right metrics — ones that measure your success, like profitability. These metrics can then inform your strategic decisions and help you increase revenue across the board.

A short term win: Make strategic decisions aligned around overarching goals

Every decision and action in the business needs to ensure it is a step towards achieving the main goals the company has. For instance, a goal such as increasing revenue can be very broad but teams can still contribute to company success whilst still reaching their individual KPIs.

Departmental goals might be focused on (ROAS, Customer satisfaction, return rates etc.) but they should still be towards one overarching goal. By using an automated platform like Upp, businesses can gain full visibility of departmental performance to better understand how to drive those individual metrics such as ROAS, while still contributing to the business’ overarching goal of growth. Upp can ensure every decision is based on data and is aligned around central targets, allowing teams to better justify their budgets.

Upp delivers an easy-to-use, automated Google Shopping platform which provides data that Google Shopping itself cannot. With Upp, you can gain SKU level data and better match your marketing data to your retail performance data in order to make informed decisions about where your spend should go to get products out of the negative margin and increase growth.

The long term goals achieved…

Actionable insights and decisions can be executed while being strategically aligned across the whole business and ensuring revenue growth along with profitability are your primary goals. The right tech tools can help.

With Upp, Each Decision You Make Is Backed up by Data.

Book your Free Audit today and get unparalleled analysis and insight into your Google Shopping performance, so you can make business decisions that drive success.