There’s plenty of valuable insight to be gleaned from the usage stats for your online content. How people are accessing (or sometimes failing to access) your online materials can provide a lot of important intelligence about your customers:
1. The big picture. Usage data really starts to come to life when it can be presented alongside other key details and metrics for a given customer, such as a summary of their current subscriptions, revenue totals, subject interests, related contacts and so on. Immediately, this enables you to see where usage is high or low in relation to other key customer variables, and so to create targeted messages for selling more subscriptions and increasing usage.
2. Upward and downward trends. If historical usage as well as current data can be included, you can also derive comparative metrics: for example, how does current usage compare with the same time last year? Also, a month-on-month comparison might reveal consistent usage growth or decline, both of significant interest to sales and marketing teams. With that sort of trending data easily to hand, it becomes simple to identify those ‘at risk’ customers in need of attention.
3. Cost per download. Deriving a ‘cost per download’ figure can be as simple as dividing cost by usage for a given period of time. This can be extremely valuable when seeking to emphasise the value of your content, for example as part of a renewal campaign. Again, the benefit here lies in proactively protecting your existing revenue. If usage data can be linked to payment information, then it becomes simple to calculate this metric and include it in your renewal messages.
4. Turnaways. The term ‘turnaways’ refers to customers who are refused access to your online content (eg. due to the lack of a valid subscription). You might not currently be making use of this data, but if it can be tied to specific people – through login details or via IP address matching – then it becomes an extremely powerful sales tool. DataSalon is already working with IP data from Ringgold to turn previously anonymous turnaways into well-qualified lists of ‘hot sales prospects’.
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