Best Practices
Nov 2, 2023
TLDR
Inkbox, the 8-figure DTC brand, prioritizes three key metrics: profit analysis comparing revenues to customer acquisition costs, exploring cross-selling and bundling opportunities, and monitoring customer retention rates for each product category. You can easily automate these processes with Airboxr's hops such as Sales vs. Marketing Spend Hop, Cross-Sell Analysis Hop and so on to enable quick data-driven decisions.
Founded in 2015 by brothers Tyler and Braden Handley, Inkbox is a Toronto-based 8 figure DTC brand that saw massive growth within six years. The company was acquired by Bic in January 2022, and announced their partnership with Walmart in April 2023. Espousing the freedom to live without long-term commitment, Inkbox works together with artists to create temporary, waterproof tattoos that fade over two weeks. They are more recently diversifying their product categories, offering XL sized tattoos, tattoo markers, and nail stickers.
We recently sat down with the Inkbox team to ask them what metrics they prioritize on a regular basis. Here’s what they said:
Profit (revenues compared against customer acquisition costs), in each of their markets
Cross-selling and bundling opportunities to increase AOV, in each market
Customer retention rates, for each product category
“We look at these metrics on a daily basis,” says Vinay Sagar, Data Analytics Manager. “Every week, we compare them against our targets.”
Inkbox automated their reporting process two years ago, and they have two data analysts to untangle specific analytics problems.
Want to be able to analyze your own store metrics the way Inkbox does? Here’s how you can do it with Airboxr:
Profit report
Inkbox compares their revenues against their customer acquisition costs (taken from their ad spend), as well as the cost of goods sold (COGS), and commission paid to their artists. They do not account for overheads, salaries or other fixed costs not directly tied to an order.
To compare your own store sales against your ad spend, you can run our Sales vs. Marketing Spend Hop to see a daily breakdown of figures across Shopify sales, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads.
💡 We will soon release a new Hop that calculates profits as defined above; look out for it in future announcements.
Opportunities to increase AOV
Inkbox looks at two specific ways to increase their customers’ average order value: cross-selling, and bundling.
To find cross-selling opportunities for your own store, run our Cross-Sell Analysis Hop. This automated report analyzes customer purchase behavior on your store to find out what percentage of customers buy Product B after purchasing Product A.
For product bundling opportunities, use our Frequently Bought Together Hop. This report analyzes the products that are purchased together in the same cart, giving a list of all product combinations. Alongside that, it also gives the percentage of that product combination against total orders, the combo as a percentage of Product A orders, as well as the probability of selling Product B in a bundle as opposed to selling it alone.
Improve your DTC game. Sign up for weekly tips.
Customer retention rates
Knowing what percentage of your customers are coming back a second or third time is as important to Inkbox as any other DTC brand.
To view your customer retention rates over time, use our Cohort Analysis Hop. This shows you the percentage of customers that make a purchase in subsequent months after they were acquired.
To view the returning customer rate over a specific period of time, say during a quarter or a campaign period, use our Returning Customer Rate Hop, or find it on our in-app KPI Dashboard.
You may also want to use our Returning Customer Sales Hop, which shows a daily breakdown of sales by repeat customers compared to total customers over a given time period.
And there you have it. Using these automated reports, you too can review the same top priority metrics as Inkbox does.
