Using Blender Market Report Data to Make Decisions

You have access to several reports in your Creator Dashboard. Under the Reports tab, you can see Sales, Earnings, and Event Reports, each of which is discussed in more detail elsewhere. Here we are going to look at how you can use the data in your reports to make decisions about how you price, present, and advertise your products, and what you sell on Blender Market.

Note: We recommend waiting until you have a few months' worth of report data before you start trying to develop strategies based on those data. A few weeks' worth of sales, particularly when you are new to Blender Market, are unlikely to provide sufficient data to draw useful conclusions.

The purpose of looking at your sales, earnings, and conversion data is to:

get a sense of how your products are performing
decide which products need some attention
allow you to assess the results of the changes that you make to your product pricing, presentation, and advertising.

Strategy

It's best to take a systematic approach to looking at your sales, earnings, and event data.

Identify your baselines: What is your conversion rate right now? How many of X product do you sell each day, on average? What are your average weekly earnings? How much (if at all) do any of these markers increase or decrease from one week to the next?
Look for patterns and try to correlate them to promotions, referrals, or other events: Identify high or low points in sales or earnings data and try to determine whether they could be the result of, for example, increased or decreased exposure on social media, visibility in a Blender Market weekly email, or high-profile affiliate referrals. If you are able to connect performance with marketing at this stage, it can help you create a plan for future marketing and promotion.
Experiment and keep an eye on your data: Whether you are able to pick out patterns in your data or not, try experimenting with different pricing, promotion, and marketing strategies to see what works best for you. We recommend trying one thing at a time so that you can most easily see its effect.
For example, you could highlight one specific product every day for two weeks on Twitter and see if that causes a bump in sales, and then try the same thing on Facebook or Instagram to see the result that promotion on each platform has on your sales. It could be that promotion on one or more social outlets has no discernable effect on your sales and earnings, but promotion on the other platform is very effective for driving sales. Once you know that, you can focus your efforts on promoting your products on that platform rather than the others.
Compare your new data to your initial baseline data: A few weeks or months after you have pulled your initial baseline data, pull the same (but new and updated) data to see if the changes that you made in your promotion, pricing, or presentation strategy helped to improve your conversion rate, or sales and earnings figures.

Making Decisions About Pricing, Presentation, and Advertising

The important thing to remember about using data to inform your product pricing, presentation, and advertising is that it is, to a great extent, a process of trial-and-error. You have to be willing to experiment and have the patience to see if the experiment will pay off. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.

Pricing

First, look to see how other, similar products are priced. Is your product priced higher or lower than most? Try adjusting the price slightly higher or lower and see if that makes a difference in your sales. When customers filter their searches, they can filter in $20 increments, so the small difference between $19.50 and $20.50 will make a big difference if customers are mostly looking for products like yours under $20.

Presentation

Your products may be selling more slowly because they don't stand out alongside your competitors' products. Consider adjusting any of the following, but try to test one change at a time so that you can see the effect that it has on your sales, earnings, and conversion:

Change your Featured Image
Add formatting (headers, bullet lists, etc.) to your product description
Add images or videos to your product descriptions
Add product testimonials, if you have some
Adjust your keywords or tags to appear in broader or more focused search results

It is not currently possible to view your conversion rate for each product, but take a look at your overall conversion rate. The average conversion rate on Blender Market is 4–5%, which is at the higher end of the overall eCommerce average of 2–5%. If your conversion rate is above that, great job! If your conversion rate is below that, think about how you are engaging your customers and what may be preventing them from putting your products in their carts, heading to checkout, and purchasing them. The way that you present your product could be part of it. Be sure to review any changes to your conversion rate after you adjust your pricing or presentation.

Advertising

You could just put your product on Blender Market and hope that it becomes an overnight sensation. But you will almost certainly achieve better results if you put some effort into getting the word out about your product. An easy (and free!) way to start is by linking back to your product from social media. As noted above, you can try highlighting one of your products for a couple of weeks to see if it results in increased sales. Repost other peoples' posts about your product, engage in conversations with artists whose work relates to your product, post about your own work (but not specifically about your product), and post directly about your product. Highlight what it does, how it simplifies or streamlines customers' workflows, and let readers know where they can purchase it.

If you have a Blender Market subscription, you can create coupon codes to entice potential customers to take a look at your products and give them a try. A discount is likely to sway a customer who is on the fence about the regular price of your product or has been thinking about your product and prevented from purchasing it for any number of reasons. Discounts can also draw new customers to look at your products.

Another approach to getting the word out about your product is to have someone else do the advertising for you. The Blender Market affiliate program allows you to share a portion of your profits—how much is up to you—with another person (the affiliate), in exchange for them providing online referrals to your product(s).

Want to learn more about using affiliates to get the word out about your products? Check out the Affiliates section of Creator Help.

As with changes in your presentation, you will want to test these approaches one at a time in order to gauge their effect.

What to Make Next?

Another useful tool, which is not technically a report, is the Sales tab in your Creator Dashboard. This page tells you what products you have sold, when they sold, and how much you earned from their sales. The data on this page are a bit difficult to manipulate, but if you go to the Exports tab, you can click New Data Export, select a date range, and download the information as a CSV file that you can manipulate in the program of your choice.

If you know how long each of your products has been for sale on Blender Market, you can determine the average sales rate for each product. Just divide the number of sales of a product by the number of days that it has been on Blender Market. By comparing the average sales rate of your different products, you can determine what products, or genres of products (e.g., realistic cars, urban assets, beginner tutorials), are your most popular and then work on creating more of those. Or perhaps you would rather make more high-earning products? What sells the most may not be what is making you the most money. Determine your priorities and go from there.

Note: Trends and popular products can change on a weekly or monthly basis. A good way to see what customers are looking for is by checking out the Popular Searches box on the Dashboard tab of your Creator Dashboard. Change the time frame at the Dashboard's top right to see what people have been looking for over the past two, six, or twelve months.