Prioritize What You Do

A professional reached out with an odd request.

• "Would you please prioritize what you'd do if you were me? Just tell me what we should focus on."

Here's the short list.

1. Merchandise/Product. This is where the reader gets mad at me, but if customers don't care about what you sell, then why are you even in business? In the two years since the COVID-bump, we've largely ignored merchandise/product (outside of trying to find stuff to sell) and we're about to pay for our inability to focus on what matters most.
2. Customer Acquisition. Nothing is more important if your rebuy rates are < 40%, which they are for most of you.
3. Welcome Programs. Quickly convert that customer within about 12 weeks to a second purchase, or the customer essentially leaves and all of your customer acquisition work is pointless. The two programs work together, they are in harmony with each other.
4. Email Marketing. It's essentially free and it is (outside of print) the only marketing channel you actually own and control. Why so many of you ignore email marketing is beyond me. And if the answer is "email marketing is just not very productive", well, that means you are failing. I have clients with 30% to 45% of annual sales ... from ... email marketing. Let that one sink in. 
5. Personalization. A twenty-plus year technology used by any credible company. If you aren't personalizing all of your email campaigns and your website (and display and paid social and whatever else), you are a decade or more behind your competition.
6. Budget Testing. If you spend $100,000/month in paid search, spend $50,000 one month and $150,000 the next month and learn how much you actually can spend. Execute holdouts in all channels where possible.

I know, I know, your favorite tactic isn't on the list.

That doesn't mean your favorite tactic isn't important - but make sure to fit your favorite tactic into the list above, as those concepts are more important and deserve prioritization.

Most Popular Run In Years

Something is going on with your businesses ... because this is shaping up to be one of the most popular MineThatData Elite Program runs of the past seven years!

Get in the program now!!

Cost?

• $1,000 for existing Elite Program members.
• $1,800 for first-time Elite Program members.

Data?

• Five years of item-level purchase history, delivered in .csv format.
• June 1, 2017 to May 31, 2022.

Timing?

• Agree to participate by June 10.
• Data delivered to me no later than June 15.
• Results delivered to you no later than June 30.

Memorial Day Weekend

As is my tradition, I'm going to take a long weekend. No posts until early next week. I've been doing this for almost twenty years, and if there's one thing I've learned it is that I don't get a lot of projects because I wrote something brilliant just before or just after a Holiday.

As is my tradition, I will post less often during summer ... likely three times a week, sometimes more. We haven't had a normal work environment for two-and-a-half years ... it is important to enjoy Summer ... you don't get an infinite number of them and you don't know when you'll run out of 'em.

Dying Winners

Another metric to evaluate when looking at Winners is the quantity of what I call "Dying Winners" ... prior-year Winners that fade down into Contending status.

• 3 Years Ago = 89 items.
• 2 Years Ago = 112 items.
• 1 Year Ago = 77 items.
• As of Today = 92 items.

As we can see, the merchandising team did a good job of maintaining winners. So if winning items are being maintained but the quantity of winning items is in decline, then the Development of new winners is suffering.

These issues are quickly and easily identified, aren't they?

Shouldn't New Items Marinate A Bit Before Becoming Winning Items?

But Shouldn't New Items Marinate A Bit Before Becoming Winners?

Yeah, sure, that's the question I get and if you can develop new items to become winners in two years, then you've done something right.

So let's look at this brand and how many of the items introduced two years ago became winners within two years:

• Introduced 4 Years Ago = 34 Winners within two years.
• Introduced 3 Years Ago = 33 Winners within two years.
• Introduced 2 Years Ago = 14 Winners within two years.

So yeah, sure, good question, but this company failed again on this metric.

Developing New Items is just like Developing New Customers.

We're just not good at either craft, and now that the easy profit of the COVID-bump is long-gone, we're gonna have to get back to fundamentals, aren't we?

I know, you don't want to hear that. You want a magical marketing channel to come along and make life easy.

We're gonna have to get back to fundamentals.

Post-COVID New Item Failure

Last week I reintroduced the concept of Winners/Contenders/Others.

One sign of a brilliant merchandising team is their ability to find new products that customers love. For the company I analyzed last week, here are the number of new items that became Winners that year.

• 18 three years ago, 19 two years ago, 13 one year ago, 7 in the past year.

Yup, that's not a successful Merchandising Team, now it is?

An awful lot of you are going to dig into your data and realize that your product/merchandising teams missed some of the fundamentals they acquired prior to the COVID-bump. They stopped tracking success of new items, heck, they had a hard time even FINDING new items so they just plain struggled and now here we are, with constant stories of new product issues.

If new merchandise is < 20% of your annual sales total, you probably don't need to be as thorough on this topic as I'm encouraging readers to be.

But if new merchandise is > 20% of your annual sales total and you have results like we see above, you didn't get the job done. It's time to re-emphasize new merchandise.

Winners

Nearly a decade ago I wrote extensively about the concept of Winners / Contenders / Others. Through the years, the concept evolved a bit ... then during COVID none of it mattered because sales were up 50% and nobody cared about merchandise. Last year that began to change as some items sat on ships outside of Long Beach. This year, all of a sudden people care about what they sell ... again. 

Time is a flat circle.

Allow me to show you the number of items that were Winners for a company, items that were also Winners the prior year.

• 289 three years ago, then 252 two years ago, then 232 one year ago, then 232 as of today.

And here are total Winners for each of the past four years.

• 375 three years ago, then 315 two years ago, then 331 one year ago, then 282 as of today.

Subtract the difference, and we can see how well the company did at Developing Winners.

• 86 three years ago, then 63 two years ago, then 99 one year ago, then 50 as of today.

Yeah, there it is ... a real product development issue in the past year ... the lowest total of the past four years.

This is happening for two reasons.

1. Some of you had product availability issues.
2. Many of you didn't care about merchandise during/after the COVID-bump.

Merchandise ... and new merchandise ... is about to become a big deal again, just like it was in 2012-2013 when I wrote extensively about Merchandise Forensics. As I mentioned earlier in the post, time is a flat circle.

P.S.:  Yeah, I know - here come the unsubs ... people grumbling that I'm not giving them tips to be successful with TikTok advertising. What you sell matters, folks. And if your merchandising/product team messes that up, you get blamed for it. So if you want to unsub because of that, go ahead. But just think for a few moments about how your business thrives ... and think for a moment that maybe your efforts are being stifled because of external factors related to merchandise/product.