For Better And For Worse
Written by Franco Varriano.
1. Overview
There are certain things in life that we hope can stand the test of time. Marriage is a classic example, most of those who decide to walk down the aisle truly believe they’ve found everlasting love. Over the course of a marriage that can last as many as eight decades, a lot happens. Personalities change, bodies age, and even romantic love waxes and wanes. Also, no marriage is free of conflict. Throughout the ups and downs, some couples endure and reach everlasting love. Some don’t and divorce. According to a study from the Utah State University, there are 7 main reasons why people divorce in the United States:
- Too much arguing
- Infidelity
- Marrying too young
- Unrealistic expectations
- Lack of equality in the relationship
- Lack of preparation for marriage
- Abuse
Like Tom Bodett said: “In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson”. Thankfully, we live in a society where we’re able to fail tests, learn along the way, and persevere to finally succeed.
In the ecommerce universe, we can easily compare the relationship between online stores and software solution providers (SSP) to different stages of marriages. During the courting phase, online stores receive amazing offers from different software solutions providers. Once a store agrees to try a specific solution, they both start the dating phase. Usually in a form of a free trial period, the dating phase is an opportunity for the software solution providers to please users in order to build a long term relationship with them. Successful trials lead to a commitment, unlike real life where couples exchange rings, parties exchange credit card information in the ecommerce universe. Interestingly enough, like human bodies, software does “age”, the relationship online stores have from prospects to paying customers also change. Long story short, both parties experience similar challenges that usually lead to a rupture of relationship:
- Too much arguing
- Committed too fast
- Unrealistic expectations
- Lack of communication
- Abuse
Whenever those scenarios happen, online stores (or SSPs) can usually call it quits by simply unsubscribing. However sometimes, everything works just fine and assessing the usefulness of a solution becomes blurry. Inertia kicks in and we become comfortable with our current way of running businesses. To help fight software inertia, we need an easy way to audit the current software solutions we’re using in order to make sure you’re using the best solution you can afford in that moment. According to Wikipedia, a software audit review is an internal process within a company where one or more auditors who are not members of the software development organization conduct an independent examination of a software product to assess compliance with specific criteria.
As online stores, the main goal of a software audit is to assess whether or not the value proposition you signed up for, is living up to the expectations. In order to accomplish this feat, key performance indicators (KPIs) are needed to keep track of each solution according to the right objectives.
Looking at the Shopify App Store, we notice that there are 8 main categories of solutions that you can add to your store to grow your business. To audit solutions properly, we must set high level KPIs, which focus on the product category, and low level KPIs which focus on specific solutions. Our software audit framework looks like this:
Category: Marketing
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that help you drive traffic, manage your SEO, Sell on new channels, and promote your products.
- Low Level KPI: ROI, scalability, support, integration and upcoming features.
Category: Sales
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that help you grow your business, sell more products, and increase your revenue per order.
- Low Level KPI: ROI, scalability, support, integration and upcoming features.
Category: Social Media
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that can simplify and track customer sharing and grow your social presence.
- Low Level KPI: ROI, scalability, support, integration and upcoming features.
Category: Shipping
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that help you streamline your shipping process and make it as easy as possible for your customers.
- Low Level KPI: Costs, reliability, geography, support, integration, insurance and scalability.
Category: Inventory
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that allow you to spend less time managing your inventory.
- Low Level KPI: Costs, features, integration, support and scalability.
Category: Customer Service
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that allow you to engage with customers and offer better support with email, phone,live chat and more.
- Low Level KPI: Engagement methodology, scalability, features, integration and ROI.
Category: Accounting
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that enables you to keep orders, customers, and all business-critical information synchronized.
- Low Level KPI: Features, integration, scalability, support and upcoming features.
Category: Reporting
- Solution: [Insert name here]
- High Level KPI: Tools that allow to track and forecast sales and analyze your customer behavior.
- Low Level KPI: Features, integration, scalability, support and upcoming features.
As you can see, there a (8) set of low level KPIs criterias that to allow us to audit software solutions and make sure they’re in line with your business objectives. As your business grows, your needs change and your tools must enable you to maintain or exceed your current operational quality. Let’s run through an example using Rare.io’s predictive email marketing software.
Category: Marketing
- High level KPI: Tools that help you drive traffic, manage your SEO, Sell on new channels, and promote your products.
- Low level KPI
Return on Investment
As you know, marketing includes all the potential channel businesses take to promote their business. In ecommerce, email marketing is a key to success and keeping track of results enables you to adjust your strategy in order to optimize returns. At Rare.io, the customer dashboard contains the Power 7 of Email marketing which gives direct insights on how the current operations are going. Customers can easily see how much money they’ve made of their email marketing campaigns since day 1. Our merchant here made more than $870,000 off their email marketing campaigns while spending $903 a year on Rare.
Scalability
Most online stores start with one or two entrepreneurs with nothing but a dream. The ability to have access to quality tools from day 1 helps them provide high quality services and grow their businesses. Rare.io’s scalable solution works perfectly from small stores with less than 5 customers to Shopify Plus’ stores with hundreds of thousands of customers.
Support
Frequently Asked Questions and Knowledge Centres are common support materials. Beyond that, personalized onboarding is always special when you’re a new customer, but the ability to have access to a dedicated account manager is priceless. Rare.io’s dedicated account managers are accessible for training, troubleshooting and goal settings.
Integration
In today’s day and age, when companies want to stay ahead of the game they need all their systems to work synchronously. Rare.io’s Predictive email integrate with your Shopify stores to analyze customer’s buying behaviors to recommend the next products each customer will most likely buy, when they will buy them and when they’re likely to stop buying.
Upcoming features
Last but not least, upcoming features assure you that the people behind the solution are working to improve the service and make your life easier. At Rare.io, we focused our energy on email scalability and deliverability during the first quarter of 2016. We’ll focus on our UX, prospecting and segmentation ability during the second quarter of the year.
How often should you perform the audit?
I was not able to find a research backed answer for that question, but my guess would be to perform an audit after every milestone. The audit will help you gather the best tools available to reach your next milestones. Like Ray Kurzweill said on Live Long Enough to Live Forever: “The goal is not to find a blue pill to live forever. The goal is to use the latest technology available today, to optimize your results until the next wave of innovations come along”.
4. Conclusion
If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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