Eighty percent of online users from India have made purchases from E-commerce platforms within the last thirty days. This huge number can be attributed to the fact that e-commerce brands are now an integral part of our ever-growing economy. However, this statistic also shows the brands just how many competitors exist to cater to all those requests. The e-commerce sector is now a substantially more crowded marketplace, each passing day adding more.

And hence, all such brands need to be in top form. Anything less might squish their hopes of being relevant and competitive in this superfast industry. And here is where Predictable revenue kicks in.

Predictable Revenue is a framework to create consistency year-over-year and provide business growth based on an efficient formulaic process. This helps in predicting how much revenue your business is constantly generating. Revenue spikes that don’t repeat often won’t help you achieve consistent growth in the years to come. This is where having a proper lead to your customer profile will come in handy. However, Predictable revenue from such leads can take months due to time spent on whether to start a new program, implementing it, and adding in your sales cycle length.

Let’s now discuss some useful techniques that might be helpful in building predictable revenue for e-commerce.

Craft The Buyer Personas For Your Customer Population –

You need to clearly understand your ideal buyer, only then will you be able to market effectively You will be investing your valuable time, money and precious resources to create a seemingly perfect plan that will not be able to hold its own later in time leaving you wondering. The best way out of this would be to take enough time to craft the buyer personas of your potential customer base. Having taken care of that, it should be easier for you to market to a more relevant audience and increase your market efficiency.

A semi-fictitious representation of your ideal buyer is basically what helps you in determining the buyer personas. You will want to ensure that your entire team understands these personas perfectly. Several factors can be helpful in building these personas. Some of them include but are not limited to Age, location, income, interests, wants and needs.

The buyer’s journey to buying from your company will consist of nonlinear paths. And hence it’s necessary that you document your buyer’s journey based on a general journey on a path taken by your ideal buyer. There will be triggers that will exist in each stage of the journey. Mapping out the buying journey effectively will help in defining them

Ideal Customer Profile Development (ICP) –

The Ideal Customer Profile can be defined as the firmographic, environmental and behavioural attributes of accounts that in the future can be expected to become the company’s most valuable customers. This is not to be confused with the term “target customer “. Most organisations use the latter to describe any client that might purchase a product or service. However, ICP caters to the customers that are most valuable and prospects that are most likely to buy.

Terms like Total Addressable Market or Total Available Market are different from ICP as these are calculations or estimates of the universe of potential target customers. Getting clear on the Ideal Customer profile, including how to describe them and what their core challenges are will be a help in the right direction.

Metric Tracking For sales –

There are two factors that help define predictable growth. Where you are now and how you got there. And hence, businesses need to work their way back through every process stage. Once they reach the research and preparation stage of prospecting, the numbers can then be checked efficiently. This will help you build a bigger picture of how the organisation is generating its yearly revenue.

Once you have a clear idea of the dependency of each metric with the other, it will be easier to look at the metrics and decide if something goes wrong and hence distinguish between a local or a much larger problem.

The value of doing things this way is that it saves you from any extra unnecessary work. There will always be individual contributing factors within the overall plan. Knowing about them would always be an advantage. However not having this level of detail, you will know something is wrong, but often have no idea what.

Customer Retention –

If you are an online business and are aiming for predictable revenue, you will definitely want to keep those customers who would like to stay that way for a longer time rather than those whose unpredictability can significantly impact your revenue. Steering prospective buyers towards the annual subscription page will not be that helpful in such scenarios. Unsuitable prospects will lead to unwilling purchasers which in turn will lead to unhappy customers. Make sure your prospecting is on point. Once that is corrected, you will be marketing to your own customer base and you will not have to deal with higher churn rates and unstable customer relationships.

To build a more stable and loyal base of customers, using data-driven decisions can help. If you would like to start using customer data analytics in order to prevent customers from churning, we suggest you try out Datoin, machine learning.