Focus improvements on one small area

One piece of gardening advice is to start improving one small area of 2-4 feet first. Once it's highly fertile, expand to a second small area.

Contrast that to spreading around the improvement to the whole area.

In the first, the focused approach, you're likely to see large improvements and benefits quickly. Often in the first year.

In the second, the wide approach, you might see improvements overall but it could be difficult to know. Would you be able to see a 1% improvement in your day-to-day and know it came from your changes? It can also take years of hard work to get everything up to quality.

This focused approach combines the old advice of quality over quantity along with sustainable growth. Once the first plot is done, it won't be much work to maintain while you work on the next ones.

It also lets you experiment much easier. You could start three areas, each with their own improvement plan, measure their progress, and then pick the one you'd like to keep. I saw one gardener do this with 20 different soil improvement techniques before settling on the handful that worked the best for his new area.

Now to take it into ecommerce, your business is the garden as a whole and harvests are your sales.

You can do changes across the board to try to improve everything. Or you can focus on one area, improve that, and then expand.

You also have the flexibility to determine what your "areas" are. Given my experience with customer segmenting in my app I'd say customer segments are the fastest way to see results. e.g. start by improving the performance of your Loyal segment in all ways, then work on Potential Loyal.

Alternatively you could select areas by function. e.g. Order size, getting the second order, cart abandonment. One problem with functional areas is that they interact with each other a lot so you could be jumping back and forth a lot (i.e. they don't hold benefits like garden soil or customer segments do).

Whatever you do, having a procedure will help keep you on track.

Directive: Focus improvements on one small area.

Eric Davis