How to Troubleshoot Decreasing KPIs

Overview

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are metrics that identify how successful your business is in achieving its goals and maintaining good deliverability practices.

Some KPIs that measure your success include open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and more. In this article, you will learn how to adjust your strategy to improve vital KPIs within AVADA.

Owned revenue

Owned revenue consists of any revenue attributed to the owned channels (i.e., email, SMS, forms) sent through AVADA. For instance, if a customer engages with your email and then makes a purchase within a workflow, that purchase is a part of your owned revenue.

If you notice that your owned revenue decreases over time, it may be due to one or multiple of the following bullet points. Each is mentioned in more depth in the next few sections:

- Successful email deliveries are down, or you're sending fewer emails

- Unique opens are down, and hence fewer people are reading your messages

- Unique clicks are down, and fewer people access your website

- Conversion rate is down, and hence fewer people are purchasing

- Form submission rate is down, and hence list growth rate is down

- AOV (Average Order Value) is down, and hence the monetary value of your customers' shopping carts and total revenue are lower than usual

Successful Email Deliveries

The successful email deliveries metric is the total count and percentage of your emails that are delivered to your subscribers. Hence, these do not include emails that bounce, regardless of whether it is a hard bounce (due to a permanent failure such as a false email) or soft bounce (due to a temporary error like a full mailbox).

If you notice that your successful email delivery rate drops below 99%, and your bounce rate is increasing above 0.15%, it's high time to clean your lists. In addition, consider creating a segment of unengaged contacts and cleaning them out.



Something else to consider if you notice a low number of successful email deliveries is the quantity and sending frequency of your campaigns, as well as how many recipients you are sending to.

Keep a regular email cadence with your audience, especially those who are most engaged. Don't stop even when you have momentum, as your primary goal should be to build a long-lasting relationship and community around your brand that grows from your messaging.

Nevertheless, if you send too many campaigns over a short amount of time to the exact same recipients, it can overwhelm them and increase the likelihood of them  marking your emails as spam or unsubscribing. This will shrink your email list and affect the count of deliveries in subsequent sends. If you are struggling with this cadence, consider creating a content calendar to keep track of your sending schedule.

For workflows, if you see the deliveries decline, review all of your live workflows and identify where the decline is stemming from. Check to make sure that the workflow is still triggering as expected and the data is syncing properly to AVADA. For instance, if you recently updated your E-commerce store, but forgot to include viewed product tracking, your product browse abandonment workflow may have stopped sending, causing a decrease in successful email deliveries.

Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of people who open your emails, and is thus a prominent measure of engagement. If your open rate is critically low, you should do the following:

- Adjust your email subject lines

- Create an engaged segment

- Target your engaged segment with applicable content

- Monitor deliverability going forward

Other things to consider when you notice low open rates are how often you send, whom you send to, as well as what content you are generating at the time when your opens decrease. For instance, perhaps a sudden change in list membership contributed to an open rate decrease. If you recently promoted a giveaway campaign and gained unengaged contacts, then this may affect your typical metrics.

Consider if there either was a change in the following to cause this, or if you need to adjust these actions in general:

Your subject line

Are you offering fewer sales, promotions, new arrivals, or back in stock recently? Your email subject lines should grab a recipient's attention and motivate them to click to read your entire email content. This is directly in your control, so personalize your subject lines to connect with your audience. For more best practices, head to our following blog articles:

- How to Write The Best Subject Lines for Open Rates?

- 99+ Best Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines

- 99 Tempting Email Subject Lines for Spring Season

- 33 Holiday Email Subject Lines and Most Favored Emojis

- 33+ Best Thanksgiving Email Subject Lines

- 32+ Best Halloween Email Subject Lines

Your audience

Check the amount of time your contacts have been with you - have they been on your list for a long time and are now unengaged subscribers? Refine your subscribers and create segments to make sure that you are sending to people who are most engaged and want to open your emails.

Your sending strategy

Have you been sending more or less frequently? For instance, perhaps your subscribers are facing email fatigue if you send too often to the same contacts. Alternatively, don't send too infrequently for subscribers to forget about your brand.

Consider trying out A/B testing for workflows and campaigns, or[ schedule the time of the day](https://avada.crisp.help/en/article/how-to-schedule-to-send-a-campaign-eq4hxc/) you send emails. By monitoring your results, you can understand what resonates best with your audience.

For more information on how to fix a low open rate, head to our article on Email Marketing Open Rates: The Complete Guide.

Click Rate

Click rate refers to the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of those who received your email. There are a number of reasons why your click rate may decline at different times as you send out campaigns and workflows.

Below is a list of potential reasons to look out for:

- Fewer incentives in your email content. If you have recently increased your product/ service price or offered fewer discounts, a drop in incentives may translate to a drop in clicks. Alternatively, if recipients are getting too much of the same content, they may be less likely to click into your emails. So, avoid sending the same product offering or message content to the same contacts. Instead, keep them engaged with creative content and new collections.

- Broken or fewer links. Broken links can confuse or frustrate your recipients, leading them to not open your emails in the future or even mark them as spam, which will harm your deliverability. Ensure that your links are always valid before sending or scheduling your emails. Furthermore, include links where needed though always make sure to have one main CTA (call to action). Link to recommended products, more collections to explore, or a navigation bar for your website.

- Rendering change. Always ensure to account for desktop vs. mobile layouts for your emails. For example, if a rendering issue occurs on one of the layouts, customers using that device are less likely to click your emails.

- Slower email load times and clipping. If your recipients experience slower load times or clipping, then the click rate is likely to diminish for those email sends.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate measures how often your audience becomes your customers. When you use your channels to the fullest, you will be able to nurture customers through the acquisition funnel, right from when they first hear about your company to when they become loyal brand enthusiasts. This relationship starts in earnest at conversion.

If you see a decrease in conversion rate, consider why your subscribers may not be making that first purchase. Maybe you need to focus on acquiring new subscribers that have never bought before. Maybe your content is not effectively encouraging them to purchase.

Moreover, check if there are any changes in the following areas:

Links leading to non-ecommerce pages of your website

Consider different page types that you link out to in your messages, and cut down on links that don't lead to your products or services page.

Generally, you want a link from your messaging to prompt a conversion. If you link to your homepage, blog, news article, or collections page instead of your E-commerce-related page, perhaps this is why. Remember to use links wisely, and make any changes where changes are due.

That doesn't mean that you should remove all non-ecommerce links that assist your business (such as your contact or unsubscribe pages), but rather cut down on ones that do not help your business grow. Otherwise, feature your items in a more subtle way in copy and creative work to make it much easier for someone to follow up and purchase.

Changes in the checkout experience

If you have currently changed the checkout experience in any way, this could also lead to a decrease in conversions. Likewise, if your product price or shipping costs recently increased, this will significantly have an effect. If your prices have risen, you might want to re-think who you target to accommodate for slightly higher price points. For instance, send new higher-priced promotion emails to a segment of VIP customers.

Additionally, make sure to have an abandoned cart workflow to set up to drive conversions. Head to our Guide to Creating Abandoned Cart Emails for more information.

Decline in the open and click rate

If there is a significant decline in your open and click rates, then your conversion rate will likewise diminish. Back to the sections on open rate and click rate for troubleshooting tips.

Form Submission Rate

According to studies, the average form completion rate is 2.23%. If your form submission rate is lower than usual, or too low in general, this will have a negative effect on your list growth rate, because you will not get as many new subscribers entering into your account.

Just think about how you can make these forms better at grabbing someone's attention and offering a clear and enticing CTA. Each form will differ depending on its sole purpose, and so will the metrics associated. With regard to growing lists, check if you recently changed your lead-generation efforts. This can impact your rate of growth as well. Read our article on Getting Started with AVADA Sign up Forms to learn how to strategically grow your list and enhance your form submission rate.

Revenue

Revenue measures your company's profit, including your owned revenue in AVADA as well as revenue gained via channels not directly in your control.

There are three primary situations to monitor that may cause revenue to fall:

Traffic is the same, conversion rate is the same, total orders are the same, AOV is down

A lower-than-usual AOV means that customers' shopping carts are lower in price than normal, maybe because of a sale or recent promotion. This may have to do with a decline in average item price, a higher discount, or a lower amount of items in your customers' shopping carts. If the reason for a lower AOV is intentional, you don't need to worry. Otherwise, target your engaged customers with higher-value goods, or create an upsell or cross-sell workflow to encourage a second, potentially high-value purchase. For your VIP customers, introduce a loyalty program and create a VIP welcome workflow to recognize their loyalty and drive more repeat purchases.

Traffic is the same, AOV is the same, conversion rate is down, total orders are down

Total orders are down as a result of a lower conversion rate. If people convert at a lower rate, fewer orders are placed, and thus a loss in revenue is incurred. This may be because your average add-to-cart rate is low, your average bounce rate is high, or even your cart abandoned rate is high.

Traffic is down, AOV is the same, conversion rate is the same, total orders are down

In this situation, total orders decrease as a result of declined traffic to your website, and thus, fewer orders are placed. Consider improving all of the channels that drive customers to your site:

- Organic

- Direct

- Social

- Email

- Referral

- Other

You can also promote awareness of your brand and continue leveraging your owned channels with attractive sales and promotions to re-engage subscribers. Plus, create win-back workflows to identify and re-engage inactive customers. Use different forms in creative ways to acquire more subscribers and build relationships with returning customers over time.

Leverage your brand community in order to amplify your social media presence with unique hashtags and shareable content. Launch VIP programs to gain insight into how to improve upon your current E-commerce brand, and ask your VIPs to refer their friends for an added incentive.

Updated on: 06/09/2021