💡 Get an introduction to the Growth Engine and the full glossary of terms here.
What is the "Order Frequency" Growth Strategy?
The Order Frequency growth strategy features in the flywheel of the Growth Model.
Your "Order Frequency" Performance
The “Order Frequency” growth strategy is all about increasing the repeatability of customer orders. In most businesses, customer ordering patterns are surprisingly predictable with the right analysis. Take a look at your average order frequency in the Growth Engine.
How is "Order Frequency" performance calculated?
Your "Order Frequency" performance is based on the average number of orders customers place within a period of time.
To represent your data as a comparable trend over time, we've used trailing twelve months (TTM) (a period consisting of data for twelve consecutive months), so that every period is comparable and contains an instance of every month. This is done to reduce effects of seasonality in the metrics. TTM analysis is the clearest way to see true trends in velocity accounting for seasonal variances in December, summer vs. winter, bank holidays etc. It clearly illustrates whether you're successfully accelerating the velocity - are you generating more Enquiries in a period, or is your velocity static or even falling?
Whether you need to reverse a falling trend, bump up a static trend, or accelerate an already upward trending velocity, keep reading for great strategies, advice, hints & tips.
Ways to improve your "Order Frequency" performance
Being able to prompt customers at the right time can avoid delayed or forgotten orders. Not only does this increase your sales revenue, but it's been shown to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s a great way to quickly increase profits and reduce customer attrition!
Identify & chase missing orders
No matter how good your marketing, quoting and order-taking processes are, some customers will at some point look elsewhere for other products and suppliers. Spotting that is hard, and yet doing so quickly is essential for customer retention. The CRM’s Missing Order Alerts automatically identifies at-risk customers, allowing you to act early and avoid customer churn.
⭐ Action: Use the Missing Orders tile on the Account Manager Dashboard to chase missing orders from existing customers.
Make it easier for customers to order
No more vague order confirmations! Why make it difficult for your customers to place orders with you by only giving them the option to email or call? Instead, add "Approve" and "Decline" buttons to your PDF Quote documents (Word and PDFs) and/or to the covering email to get unambiguous order confirmations coming through thick and fast! These buttons take the user to the Customer Portal to action that stage of the Quote-to-Order Workflow.
⭐ Action: Set up your Customer Portal, then add the Quote-to-Order Workflow buttons to your key sales documents.
Send offers to your customers via marketing campaigns
Using the "Customers who Bought X but not Y" Report, discover which customers purchased one specific product from you but not another. Knowing who these customers are and making them aware of a second item can encourage greater purchase volume per customer. Use one of our marketing integrations to then inform these customers of products that they could be benefiting from to drive upsell.
You can tag Contacts from a Report to send them to Mailchimp, or add Contacts from a Report into a Campaign Activity, then send them into your integrated marketing automation platform.
⭐ Action: Integrate marketing tools to send offers that drive customers to the top-right of the RFM grid.
➡️ Next, take a look at our guide on how to improve "Retention".