Diving deep into the world of eCommerce metrics, this episode reveals how the right numbers can shape your business success.

Oliver Spark from Sweet Analytics guides us through the importance of understanding and leveraging key metrics like AOV, frequency, new customers, and CAC. Learn how to quantify your growth targets and the critical role new customers play in achieving these goals.

My name is Matt Edmundson, and beside me is the talented and

beautiful debonair gorgeous, Sadaf Beynon who is the show's producer.

It's great that you're here with us.

Why are you laughing?

Uh, in our August series, uh, what we're doing, uh, dear listener, is if you

didn't catch last week's episode, August is a little bit different, isn't it?

August is one of those funny months of the year.

And so we had all kinds of grand plans for August this year, but alas!

We decided to change it very last minute.

Uh, these episodes, uh, where Sadaf and I have a little chat about things

that we have learned along the way from e commerce cohorts, we're going

to explain what e commerce cohort is.

We're going to talk about the lessons today from Oliver Spark's workshop,

um, what they meant for our business, our e commerce business, and just

to give you a little flavor of what's going on behind the scenes.

It's going to be a cut down version of the show, of the

podcast, because we appreciate.

August is one of those things.

It's just one of those months where...

Most of the world seems to shut down.

So, uh, yeah, hopefully that'll make sense.

Uh, does that make sense?

I don't know.

I, I, I know what we're doing.

I don't know if I've explained it well enough.

Yep.

Makes sense.

Makes good sense.

Carry on.

Good.

Good.

That's the main thing.

So cohort, let's talk about cohort because cohort sponsors e commerce podcast.

If you're a regular listener to the show, you will have heard me

say something along the lines of.

This show is sponsored by eCommerce Cohort, uh, and, uh, eCommerce

Cohort is something that we do.

It's part of our business network, for want of a better expression, um, and

it's, it's basically training, eCommerce training that you can sign up to, uh,

and the way it works is every month we do an expert workshop, um, and we do

a mixture of coaching and Q& As around that expert workshop to help you extract.

The best parts of it for your business, um, and we say, listen,

take away like three or four key, key points from that workshop.

Figure out how it's going to apply to your business.

We help you with that with coaching.

Uh, any questions you've got, we do with like Q& A.

And then hopefully it helps you grow your business.

It's kind of like e commerce podcast, but on speed.

It's kind of really focused on being hyper practical, isn't it?

And the workshops are hyper practical, uh, from these great guests.

So, that's kind of how it works.

Have I missed anything?

No,

no, not at all.

All there?

Yep, all there.

All there.

Awesome.

That's amazing, right?

As long as I've got it all there.

So, which one are we doing today, Mrs.

Beynon?

What cohort episode shall we do?

Or cohorts?

All right.

So we're going to keep, um, going with the momentum from last week, or a

few minutes ago, with a peek into the number crunching world of e commerce.

Don't tell

her that.

There's that.

Don't, don't say that.

Because everyone's like, What do you mean from a few minutes ago?

No, no, no, no, no.

We obviously record these episodes once a week to keep on top of it.

We don't batch record in any way.

That was just a slip.

It just, yeah, so happens.

Matt, you're wearing the same top that you were wearing before.

But that's okay, you know, it just is what it is, really.

But no, we recorded episode 1 and then we've gone straight

into episode 2 for August, so behind the scenes full exposure.

We are doing these back to back, uh, recordings and we're not going to get

them all done are we today because of time, but um, but that's what we're doing

because August, we tend to not be around as much, so, uh, we appreciate you're on

holiday, but we're on holiday as well, so.

Uh, just clarifying, we're not being lazy, but yeah, so I'm from a few, sorry,

I totally interrupted your flow then.

What were you talking about?

No, no, that's okay.

I was saying that, um, today we're going to be diving into

the number crunching worlds of e commerce metrics with Oliver Spark.

So we're going to be talking about the lessons we learned from his workshop

and, um, how about we start with...

Um, you know, we're talking about the, the three letter abbreviations

that we have all over e commerce.

So AOV and And, um, you know, all that good stuff.

So, Matt, do you want to jump in?

Do you want to, um,

talk about that?

Do you want to build a snowman?

No, it's, um, Uh, yeah, we'll talk about Oliver, Spark, and metrics.

I think what you need to...

Do though.

Sadaf mm-hmm.

, I just sort talk about some of the lessons that we have.

You should go into ChatGPT and see if you can come up with a much sexier title

or description than we're gonna do some number crunching and metrics because

it's just one of those things, things.

Uh, it's math.

I don't care.

Listen,

I think, I don't think it matters what kind of title you give it.

It's always gonna be like that.

. No.

Well, your challenge is to go try and find a different, anyway, , uh.

Now, uh, full disclosure, uh, Oliver's workshop at the time of recording

was one of the most recent ones.

We've got Monica coming up in August, um, which I'm really looking

forward to, but Oliver's is the most recent workshop that we've had.

And whilst metrics can sound a bit dull and uninteresting, Oliver made

it actually really really interesting.

Um, and we learned a lot from this.

We watched the workshop as a, as a company.

We went through it.

We had lots and lots of conversations.

Um, lots of conversations.

And Oliver has been on the podcast as well.

So if you caught that episode, you'll know that Oliver is in

fact from The White Company.

He was one of the guys that sort of got it to where it is.

Um, it's a huge company here in the UK.

And so he took it, I think, from six million at that point, upwards.

I can't remember the exact time he joined, but he knows retail.

And one part of his story is the discovering of sort of key metrics,

which really helps him understand the growth of his business.

And this is what he was talking about and how we can do it in a super practical way.

So, and the reason I liked Oliver's workshop is because he agreed with me.

Oh, yes.

Now this is, it's a beautiful thing when you come across experts who

say the same thing that you do.

Makes me feel good about myself.

Now he was, um, a bit like when we talked about Vance Morris in last

week's episode a few minutes ago.

Uh, he agreed with me about a few things now, um, about touch

points, but Oliver talked about key metrics, which you need to measure.

And we've talked about it somewhere in our office.

There are three key metrics that you have to be really aware of.

Uh, the number of new customers you have, the average order value, and

what I call customer frequency, but what Oliver calls AOC, which is the

average number of orders per customer.

I call it customer order frequency, it's the same thing, um, but this is

basically how many times a customer will place an order with you.

Uh, say over a 12 month period.

So if they place two orders a year, can I increase that to three orders a year?

For example, if I can, I'm going to increase my business by a third, right?

So if I can increase average order value by a third, I'll

grow my business by a third.

If I can increase new customers by a third, I'll grow my business by a third.

The cool thing is if I increase the number of customers and the average

order value and the customer order frequency, if I can increase all

three at the same time, uh, I don't.

I get geometric growth, if that makes sense, which is where it

starts to become quite beautiful.

Anyway, he talked about this, Oliver, he talked about tracking the number of

new customers, um, the customer order frequency and average order value,

which was great for us, just validation that we were on the right track, um,

and really liked how he was thinking.

Love how he's got something called Sweet Analytics, a little bit of software.

If you're looking for a dashboard, check it out.

Um, It's uh, we're, we're having a little play on it at the moment actually with,

uh, with one of our e com companies, um, because it tracks these three metrics

really well, which I, which for me are really key metrics, if that makes sense.

So, um, yeah, that was really, really good, really validating and just.

Again, looking at that from our point of view.

One of the things that came out of it, he said this on the podcast and

he also said this in the workshop.

Um, and he talked about it on the, in the workshop a little bit more, which I've

never really heard anybody talk about.

And this was, um, you know, when you get these sort of little aha moments

when someone's talking, you write it in your notes and you star something

or you draw, I draw boxes around things because I thought it was super cool.

The way Oliver mentioned this, he said, you need to understand the

number of new customers you have to have to get your growth target.

So if you want to grow from 1 million to 5 million over the next three years,

how many customers do you need in year one, in year two, in year three?

What are the new, what are, so don't just tell me you want to

go from 1 million to 5 million.

Translate that down.

to actually how many new customers you need to go and get, right?

And so this was super powerful because everyone's growth target I've ever come

across is we want to grow by 20 percent.

So it's either a percentage growth or we want to grow by a turnover number.

We want to grow by A million pounds.

We want to grow by three hundred thousand dollars a year or whatever

your growth targets are, right?

And everyone defines it in those two terms where oliver came in

and did something differently.

He says, oh, these are great Actually, what does that mean in

terms of number of new customers?

And so to understand the answer to that question, you've got to understand how

many of the customers How much customer buys what's the average order value?

What's that customer free?

You know how many times they come back?

What that has, you've got to extrapolate that with some clever maths in Microsoft

Excel or use sweet analytics either way.

Um, to come up with a magic number.

So if I know actually to reach my growth targets, I need 2, 446 new customers.

Well, that becomes quite defined, doesn't it?

That becomes quite, um, becomes a lot easier from a marketing point of

view to go, Right, go and get me two and a half thousand new customers.

Um, the third lesson, obviously, Oliver talks about them following on from that

is CAC, your customer acquisition cost.

So understand how many new customers you need.

What it costs to go and get a new customer and obviously that needs to be lower than

the value they bring to your business.

Otherwise you have problems and you're hemorrhaging cash.

But so let's say a customer average order value is a hundred bucks, but

it costs you 30 bucks to go get the client and you need 2000 of them.

Does your marketing budget then have a 60, 000, um, Allowance in it to go and

get those 2, 000 new customers, right?

So your marketing budget is set around the number of customers you

need to go get, um, which I thought was very clever, very insightful.

Obviously, there's other things that we need to include in our marketing budget,

email marketing, repeat purchases, and all that sort of stuff, which is great,

but in terms of customer acquisition, going and getting new customers, the

big takeaway for me, can you define the number of new customers that you need?

What's the cost of getting them and does your marketing then align with those?

Things now he talks about that much more in the workshop and gives you

some great ideas about how to measure them how to do them and But that

was the powerful takeaway Mm hmm.

Yeah, a growth strategy that is cognizant of the value of new

customers is it's quite game changing Isn't it for an e commerce business?

It's not like yeah, but the metrics help to to guide the The direction

of your business, but having that information makes it seem like

it takes it to a different level.

Yeah, it does.

And this is true whether you're starting out, uh, whether you're brand new to e

commerce or whether you've been, you know, like me, you've been around a while and

you're a bit of a dinosaur in e commerce.

Um, but this ability to translate it down, like I need to go and get 500

new customers this month and just track that and relentlessly track it and

go, am I, am I going to be on target?

Yes or no?

There's obviously more to it and Oliver covers that in the workshop.

But you're right, it's one of those, um, things that is, it's game

changing because it's very definable.

It's certainly quantifiable, um, and, and going after that, I think

then becomes, um, becomes one of your primary aims really, uh, in eCommerce.

And so really valued that workshop, you know.

We've had a lot of conversations since actually, a lot of questions came in,

gone back and forth with him on some of the answers to those questions.

Really intrigued by some of the ways he measures things

and, um, yeah, fascinating guy.

We're doing actually a joint call this week, um, with a company, which I'm

really looking forward to actually be really interested to see how he works.

Um, and the other thing I'm looking forward to is getting behind the

scenes on his dashboard software, um, and to see what that comes up with.

Because I've not actually, I've seen some screenshots of it.

Oliver's showing me a bit of stuff, but I'm getting into play on it and stuff.

It'd be quite cool.

So yeah, do check him out.

Oliver, Oliver spark.

You can find out more information at sweet analytics.

I think it's sweet analytics.

com.

It is.

It is.

Yeah.

Now, when we did the workshop, uh, the way we do this, ladies and gentlemen, you will

not know this because you've never been in how we do this, but what we do is we get

everyone around and monitor in the office.

We watch, uh, the workshop and we usually have someone leading that.

It's not me.

All the time.

In fact, it's very rarely me.

It's like if it's a marketing sprint, Jen, who heads up marketing, will do it.

Um, and so Jen will get everybody around.

She'll bring cakes or pastries in or something.

We'll sit in the room and watch it on a Tuesday morning, the, the

workshop, and then we'll chat about it.

Tomorrow is actually a Tuesday.

Last week, we watched Oliver's, uh, Um, but you weren't there, because you are in

sunny Canada, you were not in the office, you were on your extended trip away,

thanks to digital, it's like, I'm going to have two weeks off and then I'm just

going to stay in Canada for three weeks, I will work in Canada, is what I will do,

as I'm hanging out by the pool with my family, and then I'll be back at the end

of July, we're like, yeah, okay, whatever.

So you actually missed this one, didn't you?

You missed this whole workshop sprint.

I did.

I did, yeah.

I see.

Miss it, miss it.

What can I say?

What can I say?

So yeah, that was, um, that was Oliver.

And I think if you want to know more about Oliver, do check out his podcast.

His podcast was super cool.

I really enjoyed it.

And in fact, it was his podcast, he came on as a guest.

This is normally what happens with cohort.

I, I interviewed people on the podcast and I thought Oliver is such a legend.

I thought he could do super well on one of the workshops.

Um, and so he offered to do the workshop.

He did this hour long extra training.

The workshops are only about an hour, by the way.

They're not like four hours long.

We, we, uh, we have the, the workshops, uh, delivered in an

hour or under, uh, has to be there.

Because we want it all to be lightweight.

We want, we don't want, we don't want to add to the overwhelm

because we're already overwhelmed.

I mean, uh, so yeah, we don't want to do that.

But, um, if you want to know more about cohort, do check

it out, e commerce cohort.

com.

Obviously any questions you can email us and we will try

our level best to answer them.

But if you would like to join e commerce cohort, we would love to

see you in the, in the membership.

And of course, absolutely no pressure to do that whatsoever.

Just stay subscribed to the podcast.

You're also going to learn a lot from that.

It's a win win scenario, I feel.

Win win, right?

So yeah, awesome.

Uh, cool.

Anything else from you, Mrs.

Beynon?

Uh, no.

I think, um,

I think we're good.

Think we are good, which is great.

So, let me play this.

Let's have a theme tune in the background because it's time to end the show.

Thank you so much for listening to our special August series where we've

looked at, uh, Cohort with Oliver Spark.

Next week, we are looking at marketing personas with Neil Hort.

I'm laughing because I don't actually know when we're going to record the next one.

So we're going to get into that.

Uh, obviously all that's left for me to say is you are awesome.

created awesome.

Always like to finish the podcast off with this.

Positive note.

It's just a burden you have to bear.

Sadaf has to bear it.

I've got to bear it.

You've got to bear it too.

Uh, have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.

I've seen all the music's finished already.

I talked way too long Fantastic.

Let me play it again.

Uh, there we go.

Have a fantastic week It's the high professionalism here Have a fantastic

week wherever you are in the world We'll see you next time Bye for now