Jananas

Rotman Yearbook WIN & e-commerce analytics FAIL

March 24th, 2009 | Category: customer experience,learning,rant

I’m editor of this year’s Rotman yearbook. I’ve been pretty impressed with what I’ve been able to accomplish thus far.

  1. I’ve brought the yearbook committee under the wing of our student council. Before it was a free floating group with no authority and no accountability.
  2. I’ve made some changes to the software we use to do layouts and the printing method, and as a result…
  3. I’ve been able to bring down the price per book from $40 at a loss to $25 at a profit.
  4. I’ve also been able to get funding from our student council to help subsidize the cost of shipping the books to students (many didn’t buy them as they wouldn’t be around to pick them up after graduation).
  5. I’ve also increased the content so that it includes more of the student body (so increasing the focus on the three year program) and more of the awesome social events that make Rotman a fun place to go to school. This widens the audience we can sell to and makes us more relevant.

Right now, I’m trying to get students to buy the book. Which means that I need to communicate information about the sale and then badger the hell out of the students to actually do something (like read their e-mails and click on a link).

So here’s my problem – I have no idea how many students have actually bought books since the e-mail went out yesterday morning. The only sales I’m aware of are those when students have told me in person. Sales are completed online through one of the school’s websites. And there are zero back end analytics. Yup, zero. I believe that is referred to as negative awesome. I need this information so that I can sell appropriately. For example, I don’t want to hassle students with daily e-mails if the majority of the student body has already purchased a book.

How on earth can you be a business school and not understand the importance of reporting, analytics, and the impacts of both on decision making? And I don’t think I’m terrible out of line to expect the school that is supposedly teaching me about these things to also be able to put them into practice.

So Rotman, you fail this one!

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jananas has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.
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3 Comments so far

  1. GeekiSiddiqui March 24th, 2009 6:35 pm

    Hmm…that is quite the dilemma. But great job on what you’ve accomplished! I’m ordering mine now :)

  2. Riz March 24th, 2009 8:32 pm

    Jananas++;

    The only option I can see is to try to survey 20 or 30 people randomly and that will hopefully give you a decent random sample.

  3. jana March 24th, 2009 8:39 pm

    Sadly, that doesn’t help when I need to be able to give the publishers a definite answer.

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