Last month's exercise helped you look at your target market and build an audience profile. This month, we show you how to use the reporting tools in the RCC to create a product mix that will appeal to your target market.

Start by using the Product Sales Report and Microsoft ®Excel® to determine which products have sold best for you over time. You can find the Product Sales Report under the "My Reports" menu in the RCC. You'll want to look at a minimum of three months worth of data, to get a feel for month-to-month trends.

First, run your report using the Order Type filter to isolate ‘New Purchases'. Export this data to your spreadsheet program, and sort highest to lowest UNITS for each month. This tells you what your top volume products are.

Next, sort highest to lowest on COMMISSION to find out which products are bringing you the most income. It might be useful to highlight your top five, so you can find them at a glance. Now answer the following:

• What are your top five products for volume as new purchases?
• What are your top five products for commission as new purchases?
• How much cross-over is there between your top five for volume and commission?
• Are your top five always the same or do you see spikes and variations?

Hold on to that data. Now do the same exercise with the Product Sales Report, only this time set the Order Type filter to ‘Renewals'. Again, compare your monthly data and answer the four questions:

• What are your top five products for volume as new purchases?
• What are your top five products for commission as new purchases?
• How much cross-over is there between your top five for volume and commission?
• Are your top five always the same or do you see spikes and variations?

Compare new sales to renewals

If you see that your top five productsfor new sales and renewals match pretty closely, that tells you which products appeal to your audience overall. These are the products you should lead with in your advertising.

To increase your income, approach this group with natural add-on products. For example, if one of your top five best-sellers is Hosting, but not Traffic Blazer®, offer them Traffic Blazer via an email you send through Express Email Marketing®. You'll find a template for this product and many more ready to go in the Reseller Templates category.

If you see that renewals are drastically lower than new sales for your top five, look closely at your advertising (banner ads, home page messaging, etc). If customers are failing to renew annual products, they may feel misled about how a product works or how it meets their needs.

To find out exactly why customers are not renewing, send out a customer survey via Express Email Marketing® . Then adjust your strategy accordingly. Remember, renewals are the best way to build your income as a Reseller!

If your top five or 10 products for new purchases show a much wider range of products than renewal numbers, but your renewal numbers are also growing steadily, you have found the sweet spot! This means your customers are adding to their product portfolios and your renewal base.

Look for patterns you can use
Drill deeper to see if you can find any patterns. You can use this information as a starting point for new marketing efforts.

First, run the Product Sales report with the Customer Type filter set to ‘Existing Customers' and Order Type filter set to ‘New Purchases'. This will show you which products you should be promoting to your current customers.

Then run the report again with the Customer Type filter set to ‘New Customers' and Order Type filter set to ‘New Orders'. This will show you which products you should be promoting to new customers via ads and home page messaging.

The big payoff

Now that you've created a tracking system for your product mix, take a few minutes every month to run Product Sales reports and compare your month-to-month trends. Checking this regularly will ensure you're aware of any shifts in your product mix, so you can either take advantage of the shifts or make an effort to correct them, as appropriate.