Addressing the Top DTC Challenges with Smartrr Analytics

While the past decade has been strong on new direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms, it’s been conspicuously short on analytics to aid business owners in decision-making. Smartrr’s robust, intuitive Analytics portal gives business owners the power to make informed and proactive decisions quickly.

The challenges for DTC business owners

There is a ceiling to growth when you don’t have access to data analytics. Even when you have the luxury of a popular product, guiding a business without analytics is like driving a ship without navigation — it leaves valuable insights on the table and hinders your ability to adapt when the situation requires it. 

The following are key challenges DTC business owners face with conventional platforms:

1. A lack of visibility

Without visibility over customer counts, top products, and other key data, business owners often must rely on subjective guesswork in making decisions. This introduces increased risk into their operations.

2. A reactive approach to resolving issues

When issues arise, whether it is navigating a period of market volatility or analyzing poor retention, working without analytics inevitably leads to a reactive vs. proactive approach to problem-solving. 

3. The need to compile and analyze data yourself

In order to make decisions based on data, conventional platforms require that you do the work yourself. This time-consuming process usually involves spreadsheets, poring over past transactions and receipts, and plenty of opportunity for misjudgment and data loss. Data collection is a low value-added, resource-intensive activity — especially considering the fact that software has the power to provide it for you instantly.

4. A lack of actionable information

With effective analytics, you should be able to quickly hone in one the information you’re seeking to a high degree of resolution. This can only be accomplished with filters, which let you isolate information by certain parameters. This capability is lacking on conventional D2C platforms.

5. Flagging retention

Subscribers and repeat customers are the lifeblood of modern D2C businesses. Earning them is a careful mixture of factors including marketing, a streamlined online user experience, outreach, and more. Without analytics, you cannot accurately understand how retention changes over time and which efforts are contributing to it.

The anatomy of Smartrr Analytics

Smartrr Analytics represent a new phase in D2C business ownership. In addition to providing a streamlined checkout experience for customers, Smartrr allows you to operate with an unprecedented level of insight into your customer base.

Our Analytics Portal pulls all of the key metrics you need and compiles them in one place. Visually intuitive and designed to help you absorb comprehensive insights with a quick glance, it includes the following metrics: 

• Total sales
• Customer count
• Total orders
• Average order value
• Top products
• Revenue attribution
• Revenue breakdown
• Customers by location
• Retention over time

These analytics are all highly agile thanks to the following functionality options:

Date range selection

Narrow down your results by a range of dates, allowing you to zero in on trends and totals over a period of days, weeks, months, or years. 

Purchase type filters

By isolating particular types of purchases such as add-on purchases, subscription purchases, and one-time purchases, Smartrr Analytics gives you complete visibility over how customers are interacting with your upsell and subscription initiatives in any given time period. 

Customer type

To further understand the allocation and behavior of your customer base, the Analytics Portal lets you filter your metrics by repeat, subscription, and one-time customers. 

Revenue breakdown

Choose between a weekly and monthly view of revenue performance to understand how your income has varied over different time periods. 

How Smartrr Analytics addresses key challenges

Our Analytics Portal lets you take complete control of your business decisions. With a radically simple user interface and continuously aggregating data analysis happening behind the scenes, you can now assess the state of your business with greater detail than ever before. 

Smartrr Analytics gives you the following capabilities:

1.  Unmatched visibility over your customers and products

A one-page overview of all key metrics makes it possible to digest the state of your customer base, revenue, and products in seconds. 

Quickly understand what your top products are, the state of retention relative to previous benchmarks, and what your revenue is attributed to. Optimize your marketing efforts by learning where your customers live and what channels are guiding them to you. Perform cohort analysis to compare and learn about different subsets of your customers.

2. The ability to proactively address issues and challenges

Keep each metric in context with relative change indicators. These provide at-a-glance benchmarking for:

• Total sales
• Conversion rate
• Total orders
• Average order value
  

These indicators also allow you to spot trends before they become issues. For example, if you notice that Average Order Value has begun to decline, you have the opportunity to dig in and take initiative before negative momentum develops. By identifying problems before they snowball, you switch from reactive to proactive leadership. 

3. Zero time spent crunching numbers

Our analytics software does all of its magic behind the curtain. That means you never have to worry about tracking down data or losing data from previous years or months. It’s all there, all the time, and it will be forever.

4. Insights to guide your decision making

Even the most instinctive business owners know that trusting your gut is much easier when your gut has data. Our Analytics Portal distills enormous amounts of data into actionable insights, providing you with the big picture at all times. This translates to more informed decision-making, better strategizing, easier benchmarking, and less inertia. 

5. Improved customer retention

Turning one-time customers into repeat or subscription customers requires knowing what’s working and what isn’t. With Retention Over Time and advanced filtering capabilities, Smartrr Analytics keeps you abreast of how well you’re retaining customers. Easily spot changes in retention metrics and address them at the root.

Harness the power of analytics

Data collection is only half the battle; you need reliable, smart analytics to make use of it. Our Analytics suite empowers business owners, providing the tools needed to improve visibility and decision-making across the spectrum of revenue operations. Learn more about how Smartrr can help your D2C business achieve better targeting, customer retention, and income.