6 | The Importance of Numbers and Data in your Teacher Side Hustle
In this week's Saturday Strategy Session, we chat about how numbers and data in your teacher business can influence your business. I do NOT want your eyes to glaze over when you look at data... instead, I'm here to help you be informed and confident.
There's so much data you could be looking at, but why is it even important? How can it help you? And what does it all me? This episode will help you start to answer those questions.
Why are numbers important?
They give a clear picture of what’s happening. Numbers do not lie and will point you to exactly what part of your funnel is working and what isn’t. Start with specific target benchmarks, so that you have goals to reach, but you never need to stop optimizing even after you’ve hit those benchmarks.
Takes the emotion out of decisions. Because the numbers paint a clear picture, you don’t need to make decisions based on what you think or feel… you can make more objective decisions and more quickly optimize your sales funnel.
Numbers tell a story. When you know which data points you’re looking for your sales funnel becomes more of a customer journey with a story attached to it. Each data point is a chapter of the story that’s leading you through the adventure.
Key Data Points
Here are some of the key data points I look at for different parts of my client’s business to get the full story and figure out what is happening.
Emails
When disecting the success of email campaigns we look for two things - Open Rate and Click Rate. Open rate tells your the percentage of people who opened the email and click rate is the percentage of people who clicked on a link within the email. Remember to scrub your email list once a quarter to keep your list full of people who are engaged!
Landing Pages
On a landing page, whether for a lead magnet opt-in or a sales page, we’re specifically looking at number of page views, how many people took the action we want and the conversion rate for that action.
To find the conversion rate, take the number of people who took the desired action divided by the number of page views.
Some desired actions may be to opt-in to an event, sign up to receive a free lead magnet or make a purchase.
Membership
When looking at data for a membership, it’s important to be aware of member churn and Life-Time Value (LTV). Churn is the percentage of people who leave each month and can give valuable insight about the quality of your membership. To improve your member churn, it’s a good idea to have a survey people can complete when they leave, so you can identify and solve any issues.
LTV is how much an average spends on the membership. So if it’s a $27/month membership and the average member stays for 6 months, your LTV is $162. Increase LTV by providing high-quality material that keeps members around longer and by offering a quarterly or an annual payment option.
TPT
Page Views
Conversion Rate
Facebook Ads
CTR
Cost/Click
Conversion
Lean into the data because it will be powerful and allow you to optimize your sales funnel. It’s so easy to try something and just say, “Well that didn’t work”… but if you take a bit of time to look at the data, you can almost always figure out exactly what didn’t work. Once you know exactly which part of your funnel didn’t work, it is much easier to fix your funnel and get it optimized.
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Episode Transcripts:
Hey there, I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow. A podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money with weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers. Just like you. My goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Okay. Before we get started, I'm really excited because I created a free quiz just for you. You can head to marketscalegrow.com/quiz to find out if Facebook ads are right for you and your business. This two-minute quiz has a couple of questions that you can answer to find out if Facebook ads or something else are the next marketing strategy that you should be implementing in your business. So head to marketscalegrow.com/quiz to find out today.
Welcome to this week's strategy session. I am so excited to be here today with you. Today, we are actually talking about numbers and data within your business. I'm going to cover why it's important that you know your numbers. We're going to talk about some of the key data points that you'll look for in different scenarios. Then we'll talk about how you can actually use the data in your business. I'm not going to go super deep because I have future episodes planned where we will dissect the data for different scenarios, different platforms, different pieces of your business. So today's kind of just an overview of numbers and data in your business. First off, why is it important to know your number? Number one? It is a very clear picture of exactly what is working and what is not working in your business. Numbers do not lie. Number two, it isn't emotional when you're looking at things and the feeling that you get in your gut, it can be very emotional, but if you're looking at the numbers and you have targets that you're trying to reach or benchmarks goals that you're trying to hit there, it takes the emotion out of it.
So it helps you to make decisions without being emotional. And then number three is data can tell a story of what people are doing in your, in your sales funnels or how people are moving through your ads. There is so much data that you could be collecting in your business, but it's not all going to be helpful in every single scenario. So before you start collecting data, you really need to think about why you're doing it. What are you looking for? And then you're going to pick out the pieces of data that will help you to answer that particular question that you're looking for. The answer. Otherwise, you're going to have so many numbers that are staring back at you on a spreadsheet or a dashboard, or what have you. And honestly, your eyes will glaze over because there's just too much going on. So really figuring out what you're looking for is super important.
Let's talk about some key data points that you can look for in different aspects of your business. Again, I'm not going to go super deep here. I'm just going to kind of explain what these things are and why they may be important. So first off in your email, so if you're sending out emails, there are two different data pieces that you should be looking for. The first one is the open rate. That's how many people open your emails? And then the second one is click rate. And that is how many people click on a link. This will help you to make decisions about your title, your content and your links within your email. Next is any kind of landing page. So whether it's an opt-in page or a sales page, you're going to be looking at a couple of different things. The first one is traffic.
That's how many people view the page. You can also, depending on the data source that you're looking at, collect information like how long somebody's spending on the page, how far down they're scrolling. Those are the kinds of information that could be useful, but it might just be overwhelmed. So you really need to know what you're looking for. You can also find out how many people take an action. So whether that's opting in and they become a lead, or if that is going to the checkout page or making a purchase, that is another piece of data that you can collect on a landing page. And then the last one is a conversion rate. And that's the percentage of people who take that action. So let's just say it's an opt-in page. The action is filling out the form and becoming a lead. The conversion rate would be the percentage of people who actually become leads.
So if a hundred people visit your site or your landing page and 25 of them sign up, then your conversion rate is 25% on a sales page. You would be looking at the conversion rate for purchases. So again, if a hundred people go to your page and three of them buy your sales conversion rate is 3% next membership data. I want to say, but this could also be e-commerce. You're going to look at specifically for a membership churn and that's how long people are staying in your membership. It could be two months, it could be six months. It could be a year that's important to know and understand the lifetime value of a member. And similar to lifetime value is lifetime cart value for e-commerce. And that's knowing the average amount that people are going to buy when they come to your store. So if you have a t-shirt shop and the t-shirts cost $25, people might be likely to buy one, or they might be likely to buy five, but knowing how many t-shirts the average person's going to buy will help you to understand your customers better and to have a better idea of what is the profit or what is the earnings you're going to be making.
So understanding the average lifetime value of your members, if it's a membership or lifetime cart value, or sorry, or average cart value, if you have an e-commerce shop, I know a lot of people here are teacherpreneurs and have TPT stores. So a couple of data points that are important on TPT are your page views. How many people are actually looking at a product conversion rates are important to help you make decisions, but I just want to almost word of caution, not to get wrapped up in conversion rates because there's a huge variety on TPT, and it varies from niche to niche and product to product. So when we talk about TPT, I will really dive into how you can use conversion rates to optimize your sales funnel, but I don't want you to obsess about them. And then the last one that I'm going to talk about is an advertisement.
So whether that's Facebook ads or Pinterest ads, what you're going to be looking for there is how many people are clicking on the link to go to whatever you're promoting and the cost per click. So what is the percent of people that are clicking and what is the cost to get them there? And then depending on the type of ads, you also are going to be looking at the conversion. So if it is an often ad, you're trying to get people on your email list. What percentage of people who clicked through the Facebook ad are actually going and opting into your email list? So again, this was just an overview of the different data that you can collect and a little bit of basic information about what each of those things means in future episodes. I'm going to dive into more specifics, including what kind of numbers, what kind of benchmarks you're looking for and what you can actually do with that information.
It may be an unpopular opinion because I think many people have to try things like Facebook ads or Pinterest ads and felt like they wish the money. But I do strongly believe that if you mean into the data and that you follow the direction that the data is telling you to go, that you can always make the marketing work. It's not going to be easy. There's going to be a lot of shifting and changing and optimizing that's required. But if you are willing to follow the data, it can definitely be a powerful piece of your business model. What you're going to be doing when you're following that data is if you imagine a bucket that has tons of holes in it, and you pour water into the bucket, all of the water is just going to leak out. So as you're following the data, you're finding those holes and you're able to plug those holes so fewer people are falling out of your sales funnel and you can keep more of them in your bucket.
You can keep more water in your bucket or more people in your sales funnel. And if you have a leaky bucket or you have a leaky sales funnel, and then you're pouring money into it, whether that's through paid advertisements or any other outsourcing that you're doing, if you're not following the data and you're following either your emotions or what someone else told you to do, then you potentially are just letting money fall right through those holes as well. It's really important to listen to the data and let it influence your decision-making in your business. If you have any questions about this, I am such a data nerd self-proclaimed and I would be totally happy to answer it. So feel free to reach out on Instagram. I'm at, Hey, it's Jen [inaudible] and I would love to chat data with you.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado for 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.