Supercharge Your Sales Strategy With Stripe ETL
Emma Kessinger
August 13th , 2020
For the first time last year, e-commerce claimed a tenth of total retail sales. Whether you do the majority of your sales digitally or are just getting started, Stripe is a payment processing tool that lets you take an “all of the above” approach to your sales strategy.
Stripe makes it easy to turn your sales into revenue. With affordable pricing, strong security features, and a user-friendly interface, it’s just as accessible for small startups as it is for major enterprises.
Built into Stripe is a basic analytics platform. Stripe provides its users with data points like:
- Products
- Charges
- Invoices
- Customers
- Transfers
- Subscriptions
With that said, Stripe is a payment platform first and a business intelligence tool second. If you really want to dig into that data, you’ll need an ETL tool like ETLrobot. An ETL process lets you pull Stripe data into a data warehouse, where you can slice and dice it with analytics tools of your choosing.
By integrating Stripe with your ETL tool, you’ll be able to:
1. Understand your customers.
Do most of your customers reach you online or in store? Do they like to use coupons? Do they favor credit cards, cash, or mobile payments? How often do they request a replacement product or a return?
Dig into your Stripe data, and those are the sorts of questions you’ll be able to answer. With a clearer view of your customer base, you’ll find delighting them that much easier. It’s 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one, so cater to the preferences you spot in your sales data.
2. Broaden your horizons.
When you sell online, there’s no limit to who you can reach. Although it might make shipping more challenging, why limit yourself to the American market? Why not see how the rest of the world responds to your products and services?
When you use Stripe, you can accept currencies from other countries. Use an ETL tool to check your sales strategy: If you sell snowboards and ski equipment, you might find a disproportionate number of your users pay in Canadian dollars. That’s a sign you should target the Canadian market with coupons, blog content, or other marketing materials.
3. Add companion products and services.
No matter your line of business, you’ll find that some of your products and services are more popular than others. Looking through your Stripe data can give you clues as to which ones you should focus on.
Say you’re that ski and snowboard outfitter. If you notice skis are selling twice as well as snowboards, that’s a sign you should add ski poles to your product lineup. Services work the same way: If you’re a content marketing agency that sells mostly SEO packages, perhaps you should offer SEO consulting.
4. Minimize returns and chargebacks.
Every company also has to deal with returns and payment disputes. Restocking the item or redoing the service is expensive, not to mention all the time lost sorting through paperwork.
Your Stripe data can help you minimize those costs. If you notice that most returns are associated with a specific product, the solution might be a redesign. If it’s a certain channel or type of customer, you might want to shift your sales or marketing strategy.
Perhaps you learn online sales are responsible for an outsized share of refunds: Do the product descriptions make sense? Can you get a good look at the product from its photos? Minimizing returns might be as simple as some tweaks online.
If it’s a persistent problem, customers might simply need to feel and hold your product to know what they’re buying. Focusing on in-store sales — which also means you don’t have to pay for return shipping — may be the answer.
5. Encourage recurring revenue.
Subscription-based businesses have a smart model: Customers get always-on access to your services, while you get certainty around your future revenue.
Monthly recurring revenue is easy to calculate once you have all your subscription data in one place. Knowing what portion of your costs will be covered months in the future makes it easier to plan ahead.
Think through “what if” scenarios: Maybe you notice in your Stripe data that customers who receive a coupon are more likely to sign up for a subscription. Is it worth your while to send out more? Maybe subscriptions are associated with certain currencies: An email newsletter personalized to Canadians, for instance, could grow your recurring revenue.
Whether you get it online or in store, revenue is the lifeblood of your business. Integrating a tool like Stripe with ETLrobot can show you how to get more of it, faster, and with less investment. You never know insights you’ll find.
