If you want to grow your business, the first step is to get an accurate picture of where you’re starting from. Monitoring your progress depends on data. 

Data allows you to see what works, what doesn’t, and where one of your marketing tactics may be starting to catch on. 

As a pharmacy, looking at the data is your best friend for monitoring your business growth, and succeeding more!

If you already have an eye on the data, keep up the good work. 

If you’re not in the habit of reviewing your analytics, it’s important to get started. You can keep it simple as you start out; a plain spreadsheet will do.

Spreadsheets are a nice option as they’re easy to use. You can also include charts and graphs if needed. 

Once you get into the habit and you’ve got more information to sift through, you may want to consider other options. But at the start, simplicity is key.

Simple Tracking to Start

So what are some of the numbers you may want to track as you start out?

The following are important indicators when it comes to tracking growth:

Online Traffic: 

If you have a business website or social media (and you should), that’s a great place to start. Getting more people to your website or social pages increases your chance of making them regular customers. 

If you have an insightful blog, local readers may read your articles and decide to become regular patients. If you’re offering sales and coupons on your site, they may also shop with you to save money. 

For example, say your pharmacy offers a prescription delivery service and you want to grow it. 

Writing about the benefits of prescription delivery in your blog can help increase exposure. 

The more people visit your website, the more chance you have that they’ll use your service. 

And tracking your online traffic will help you monitor your prescription delivery’s growth.  

Some good statistics to track in this area are: 

• Total visitors to your website.
• The number of unique visitors to your site.
• Bounce rate, or the number of people who arrive on your website and immediately leave again.
• Traffic source, or where your visitors are coming from. For example, are they referred by Google or finding you on social media? 

To track these items, you’ll need analytics set up. If you use a platform like Wix or Squarespace, they’ll have built-in analytics. If you use WordPress or another website solution, Google Analytics is a must-have. It’s easy to set up and provides clear and comprehensive information on your website traffic. 

Subscriber List: 

Email marketing is an important marketing tool for pharmacies. If you’re currently building your email list, some things you could track are: 

• The number of subscribers.
• Conversion rates for pages & opt-in forms.
• Open rates for emails.
• Unsubscribes.

Having this data allows you to review it regularly to see how many subscribers you have. This also applies to our prescription delivery service example earlier. By tracking your email analytics, you can deduce how interested your customers are in your service, what their views are towards delivery and so on. And the more you know about your subscribers, the easier it will be for you to convert them to loyal customers. 

Depending on your email platform, there will be analytics available. 

These analytics usually include data on open and click-through rates, unsubscribes and more. It’s important to understand where you’re at in all these areas. 

Your In-Store Customers:

Online engagement is great, but in-store customers are even better. Be sure to track your total customers and their purchases, broken down by day, week, and month. Other numbers to track are things like: 

• The total lifetime value of your customers.
• Repeat customers (front shop vs. scripts).
• Refund rates.
• Traffic sources; where are new patients hearing about you?

The lifetime value of your customers is the total amount of money they’ll spend with you during your relationship. 

Tracking traffic sources offline requires a bit more diligence than online, where analytics platforms can show you the numbers. Offline, some examples of ways to track customers are:

• Track customers who come in for special promotions or community partnerships.
• Send out direct mail campaigns with specific coupons and track redemption rates.
• Put a short survey in each bag with a chance to win a reward for responding.
• Ask; you see patients every day in your pharmacy, so have the conversation.

It’s important to understand the numbers when it comes to growing your patient base.

Income and Expenses:

How diligent are you with tracking your bottom line? Are you careful with your bookkeeping, and do you have an accountant to review your data?

If you always have a clear understanding of your income and expenses, it’s easy to track profit. By tracking income and expenses daily, you can do a careful review at the end of each month. 

This is important for your pharmacy business as it can tell you a lot about which areas you should invest in. If you are seeing an increase in income from your prescription delivery service, then you can consider investing in a software to help you stay on track of your deliveries, if you haven’t already. 

This way, you always have your finger on the pulse of your business finances. 

Choosing Your Focus

So far, we’ve talked about several potential metrics to track. But remember, it’s never a good thing to focus on too many things at once, especially when you’re starting out. 

Whether it is for your pharmacy or for monitoring your prescription delivery service, choose one avenue of growth to focus on at the start, and give it your all. 

Once you’ve progressed in that area, you can move on to the next. 

If you’re interested in growing your business, it’s vital to get a picture of where you’re at. Having access to accurate numbers means you always know what you need to see real progress.