Looking to eliminate gut-based decision-making? Want to systematically grow your business?

You not only need the right data, you need to put that data to work. Here are some invaluable tips from Vearsa's data team that are proven to drive sales.

• Don’t just put a promotion out there and hope for the best--track its daily returns and see what is really working. Verify which approaches give the “biggest bang for your buck." Vearsa Analytics provides a Daily Sales tab through which you can monitor the daily returns for a promoted title or selection of titles. This is also ringing true for self-published authors who can track the impact of signing up a title with email discovery services such as BookBub.
• At a company level you should always have a view of what is selling in each of the key territories. Monthly sales trends can be filtered to focus on countries with potential for increased sales – by looking at the titles currently at the top of the ranking you can build on the readers’ appetite for that genre by looking at what similar titles you can promote there, or what back-catalogue books are worth converting. A simple cost-benefit analysis of conversions can give the backing for untapped revenue sources.
• Look for sales spikes. If you are running a promotion then this can sometimes explain a spike, but some of our publishers have spotted an unexpected spike and by digging into the detail have opened up a new revenue channel. For example, a customer found a spike in children’s books in a territory for a particular date and this caused them to dig further. They found that an education organization had purchased copies of a specific title for use throughout several of their schools in a particular state. This opened up an opportunity to sell similar titles to that organization.
• Spread your focus. A lot of attention is given to the Top 10 sellers in a given time period, but sometimes it is worth spreading your attention. Our ranked listings allow you to look at some of the poorer performing titles and this can lead to questions around whether they are worth some attention in order to promote sales, or if they should be culled from the catalogue. And some publishers have found that middle-ranked titles can have quite high average earnings and so are worth some media promotion in order to get a reasonable increase in revenue from a modest rise in volume.
• Increase the audience. We have a number of publishers who allow team members to review their Analytics data from time to time. Ours is an intuitive system so most business users are able to work out the basics of navigating their data in no time. Initiatives such as giving team members a “country of the month” has led to some valuable insights. Each person can focus on a different target country and report back with some key, actionable findings – such as making sure that an author who has suddenly become very popular in a country has their back catalogue available. All implemented actions can then be measured in subsequent reporting months.

Interested in learning more about growing your sales with Vearsa?