Strategic Advice

We provide strategic advice on how to operate a successful distance selling organisation, regardless of whether you are planning a new e-Commerce venture or looking to improve the performance of an existing site.

Planning often starts with a performance review of your existing online business and/or a strategy exercise to successfully develop your online business.

Traffic/revenue modelling

Real TSP has developed sophisticated models to determine the effectiveness of different online and offline traffic building campaigns which we use to draw up a plan of action. Test campaigns are run to further refine the results of the model and to provide hard data prior to roll out.

For our topline forecasts, we use a detailed 'bottom-up' model which is driven by the traffic forecast, marketing budget, CRM and subscription activity, conversion rates by source and ATV / gross margin by customer type. This enables us to accurately forecast year by year traffic and revenue, with the ability to drill down on a month by month basis.

P & L forecasting

We specialise in precision forecasting and monitoring of profit and loss for e-Commerce sites, using modelling techniques which we have developed over several years.

Modelling the topline is only half of the equation when planning the development of an online business. Thoroughly understanding what resources are required to achieve sales ambitions - whether they are marketing, HR, technology or a mix of all - is equally critical for assessing the viability and potential profitability of an e-Commerce operation, and these are built into our P & L forecasts.

The payback period is also forecast, together with anticipated operating margins, and we perform advanced sensitivity analysis to ensure robustness of the plans under likely and extreme sales scenario.

Ongoing budgeting and monitoring

After discussing initial sales targets with clients, we work to allocate available marketing budget, split by month, between the different traffic generating marketing sources, such as newsletters, PPC campaigns, SEO or external campaigns.

Once the initial forecasting is completed, a final forecast is presented to our client, and then updated continuously throughout the year. We analyse and present on the 'actual versus forecast' performance every three months, including an explanation of any non-matching figures, together with plans for the forthcoming three months, pooling our ideas with those of our clients.