The best way to solve big problems? Catch them when they’re still small problems. Read on to find out how.
“Our return rate is so high!”
“Our email subscribers stopped clicking our emails!”
When you run into problems like these it’s hard to pinpoint the root cause. Your first instinct will be to zoom in: which products have the highest return rates? Which email campaigns had the lowest clickthrough?
But often you’ll run the numbers into the ground and no clear answer or pattern will present itself. You don’t need bigger data or better analysts. You need to look for the answer closer to the source.
Who is your customer, as defined internally? And who is your customer, as defined by the people who are actually buying from you?
When there is too little overlap between these two definitions, you’ll start to run into persistent problems that drag down the P&L. Here are two examples: