Your payments data is a shameless gossip, and that’s a good thing.
It can reveal multitudes about your business — information such as transaction location, consumer habits, employee information, and payment methods. One of the many wonderful services that Payfirma has to offer is PayHQ. This feature aggregates all of your payments data (transaction history, heat map analytics, and sales reporting) into one convenient place.
Payments data is highly beneficial for your business. Reporting is up-to-the-second so you are always able to make evaluations based on the most current information. Payments data can help you make better business decisions, allow you to see whether targets have been reached, and provide customer insight so you can better sell to them.
1. Make Informed Business Decisions
Payments data guide you in the right direction when exploring more efficient and economical ways to improve your business.
Your transaction history is clearly displayed which makes it easy to spot patterns. If you consistently have a lot of transactions but each is low in revenue, efforts can focus on increasing transaction sizes. Implementing incentives such as free shipping over a certain amount encourages people to purchase more each transaction.
When you look at your payment trends over certain periods (daily, weekly, monthly), you can determine the high and low periods of your business. This information allows you to make better business decisions and manage situations such as sufficient stock and employee allocation.
Your payment information also tells you the geographical location of each transaction. This comes in handy if you have plans for expansion or want to target specific audiences. In the case of eCommerce, if there’s concentrated traffic to your site from certain areas, it could be worthwhile to consider opening a physical location there or launching marketing campaigns in that area to increase business.
2. Assess Targets and Set New Goals
Making targets and setting goals are pointless if you are not tracking them. KISSmetrics’s co-founder, Hiten Shah, says, “growing your business without tracking your marketing performance is like driving with both hands over your eyes”. Looking at your payments data can give you a sense of whether your efforts were successful.
The payments data can tell you whether certain marketing campaigns are effective or not. Promos or sales are trackable by seeing how many transactions were discounted. If you launched campaigns focusing on certain products or services, you can track if there was an increase in sales for that particular item.
Analytics are especially beneficial to franchisers because you can monitor individual store performances. The compilation of transaction history by location, sales analytics, and employee information in one location will show you the bigger picture, so you can prioritize efforts based on which locations are struggling or thriving.
3. Gain Customer Insight
Perhaps what your payments data can tell you best is your customers’ behavior, needs, and wants. You can use that information to better sell to customers — both new and old. Because once you know your customers’ behaviors well, improvements can be made to the buying experience to retain existing customers and draw in new customers.
Looking at past customer behavior in terms of popular purchases, frequency, and order amount helps predict future behavior. The data informs you of how customers will respond in certain situations, such as marketing campaigns or updates to the site because you can see if sales are affected.
Payments data also tells you which items are popular and in high demand with your customers. You can then leverage the information to personalize the shopping experience by emailing product recommendations, sending abandoned shopping cart emails, and launching retargeting ad campaigns.
If you want to implement a loyalty or rewards program, you can access data that identifies devoted customers by transaction amount and frequency.
Conclusion
To ignore your payments data is reckless and with your business, you want to play it smart. Analyzing the information helps you make calculated business decisions, lets you assess target goals, and gives you insights about what to expect from your customers. Of course, there are far more in-depth tracking tools that your business should utilize, but learning from your payments data is a pretty good place to start.