Golden Formula #3 – Average Time To First Purchase

If you’ve crossed the $1 million annual revenue threshold, then you’re probably caught in Data Hell.

You put significant efforts behind your online marketing – across Facebook, AdWords, emails, and more – but now all that data is making things more confusing.

Each platform carries its own tracking, they don’t properly connect with one another, and you’re left staring at multiple browser tabs STILL asking the question, “what’s working and what’s not?!?”

Wouldn’t it be awesome to look at just a handful of metrics and get the answers?

After analyzing over $1.5 billion in sales data across our customer base, Wicked Reports has determined The Golden 4 Formulas to grow your ecommerce company.

Here’s a quick look at the third formula:

Golden Formula #3 – Average Time To First Purchase

Average Time To First Purchase is a great metric that doesn’t get a lot of publicity.

It tells you how long it will take new leads to become paying customers.

To calculate Average Time To First Purchase:

1. Segment all your customers.
2. Look at the date they first joined your email list, which is usually the create date in the CRM.
3. Then look at the first date they made a purchase.
4. The difference between the 2 dates is the time in days that lead took until their first purchase.
5. Do this across all your customers, and the average of those differences is the number of days you can expect it to take for a new lead to buy.

For example, let’s say a customer purchased on November 5th, and opted in on October 1st. That’s 36 total days.

Now let’s say we had 4 other customers who took 38, 27, 35, and 20 days to buy, respectively. Our average time to purchase for this segment would be 31.2 days.

Use this metric to set the expectations on when to evaluate new lead generation campaigns. It’ll keep you from being short-sighted and pulling a campaign too soon. If your leads take an average of 20 days to become customers, you might not want to turn off your new lead generation campaign after a week if it’s not making money yet. The leads might be great, they just need a little time to buy.

Want to see Golden Formulas 1, 2, and 4?

We’ve put together a special speed-webinar absolutely free for you to watch to help you finally answer the question, “What’s working and what’s not?”

Download The Golden 4 Formulas to grow your ecommerce company – Free speed-webinar