How To Understand Any Problem
Thank you everybody open this email again. And this week I am quite busy at work with a new project, so I thought why don’t I share it with you.
- Something about my job as a digital marketing analyst
- An approach I used to understand different problems at work - MECE, A method I learnt from management consultants
🖥 More about my Job and Career
I am a digital marketing analyst for a power tool company. And my primary responsibility is
- Dealing with marketing data. Using our data from different platforms such as social media, websites, Google, customer database etc to distil insight and give out recommendations to our team
- The output from my job is using data to answer questions. And all the question I need to deal with is mainly related to how to scale our online business in terms of e-commerce revenue and email subscriber list.
- I also build fancy dashboards for management 😂. Management love this type of dashboard which they can toggle buttons and filters by themselves
(In case you want to learn more, I am using Google Data Studio to build dashboards, a free data visualisation tool provided by Google. Easy to pick up). You can blend data from multiple sources into a dashboard to showcase all metrics.
Some examples of what is a fancy yet practical e-commerce dashboard are.
🙋🏻♂️The most asked question at work
How to make more money for our online shop (to meet our sales target this month/quarter)?
Of course, it is slightly different when we have various campaigns and promotions in countries across APAC, but the principles and methods we used are mostly the same.
I always believe we when we understand the problem, it is half the solution. So I will first try to understand it.
🧠 A framework to understand most of the problems - MECE
MECE also stands for mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, which breaks down a concept, topic, or question into separate, smaller parts.
Let me give you an example, if we want to have more sales, we can do more promotions and do more advertising, but this recommendation doesn’t sound compelling; what if we already did lots of promotions.
So it will make sense for us to break down the question into multiple components and work on it side by side.
💸 E-commerce formula
Online sales = No of visitors * Conversion rate (% of website visitors who purchase) * Average Order Value
These three components are mutually exclusive as they will not affect each other. Once we improve all three components, we will get more sales in E-commerce.
And, of course, at this level, our components can’t give us any clue on which direction should we pursue. Is it the conversion rate, no of visitors? So we will need to separate the components again.
When we dive deep into the conversion rate (% of website visitors who purchase), we know that customers will perform the following steps before they buy.
🚌 Customer Journey
- From the home page to view the product page
- Add the product to the shopping cart
- Begin Checkout
- Fill in payment and shipping info
- Purchase
We can use the same method to tackle the conversion rate by separating it into different parts. When we reach the bottom segment for the root, we can now say we thoroughly understand the problem.
Next will be how to solve the problem, which I will write in the next edition.
Have a lovely week ahead !!!
Tim
❤️ My Favourite Things
📽 Youtube Channel - ur mom’s home. Four 20s YouTubers move to New York. They decide to rent an apartment and live together to create content. Watching their Youtube video reminds me when I was in the dorm. P.S. Two of them are in a relationship now, from roommates to couples. Their video is authentic and shows their true self. Especially this video.
🖥 Standing Desk - EKOBOR Standing Desk. Yea it might be overkill for my room, but I finally bought my dream desk - a standing desk with walnut top. Perfect for working from home
📊 Infographic - The Culture Map. I tried to summarise some insight from a book I read the last couple of weeks with a 10-page slide show.
✍🏻 Quote of the week
“ There will be times in your career when the call for profits or personal gain may cloud your vision. I hope if you’re ever in the situation where you have to choose between the two.“
From Suddenly in Charge: Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around By Roberta Chinsky Matuson
Resurfaced using Readwise.