How Can Data Elevate your E-Commerce Success
Despite being published in 2017, the article from the Economist titled “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data” still remains true. Data is one of the most lucrative and valuable assets for any organisation and sadly, many individuals do not know how to leverage it to make use of its full potential. E-commerce statistics show us that retail purchases are here to stay and in fact grow. Data shared by Forbes from Emarketer tells us that “the global e-commerce market is expected to total $6.3 trillion in 2024”!
This blog will help you understand the e-commerce cycle and explore how use of data can help you to elevate your e-commerce success.
In eCommerce, data is collected at every step of the cycle.
Opportunity/ Marketing
Many individuals do not invest in the correct marketing strategy for their business. This is likely the first interaction that a customer has with the brand and you want to build its presence. There are several opportunities to leverage data at this point.
How can we boost brand visibility? Is there a target audience that you have in mind? Can we apply a multi-faceted approach to boost brand visibility?
Can we capitalize on any market trends? A very simple example is that seasonality dictates a lot of consumer behaviour. We see a surge in consumer behaviour during season sales and key events such as Black Friday, Boxing Day and Christmas. Our consumer behaviour has changed since covid and is ever evolving. It is important to be considerate of these trends and its impact to your key business decisions.
We want to be pro-active instead of reactive. Using these trends to plan ahead and take a pro-active approach to marketing is beneficial to business planning and efficiency.
Targeted ads, word of mouth and building a presence can elevate your e-commerce success. Have you considered referral perks? Research shows us that target ads can increase click through and many consumers prefer a personalized experience.
How can you use certain platforms to boost your e-commerce visibility? According to EMarketer, Google and Facebook own 60% of the digital advertising industry.
Site Clicks and Navigation
When we think of e-commerce data, it is typical to think of your e-commerce site and traffic. Many platforms give some initial insight into customer behaviour and trends and whilst that may seem sufficient, it only scratches the surface of what can be inferred.
Can we identify where traffic is being driven? Clickstream data measures user interaction.
How do we leverage site data to inform decision making? Are there certain pages where consumers are not engaging? How can we improve the user experience? What is the first thing that a consumer clicks on and views?
What are consumers using to navigate to your e-commerce site? Mobile phone, I pad, laptop?
How did the consumers arrive at the site? Can we analyse the different ways? Knowing that a large customer base is driven from Instagram would mean that we can engage in strategic marketing going forward.
Can we use this information as part of a sales funnel analysis?
Should you use google analytics for website navigation analysis?
Using this data to understand trends and behaviours can inform key business decisions that can shift your business strategy to a more targeted, data driven execution.
Consideration
We all do it — we all click on an ad, navigate to a page, deliberate for some time before making a decision. This decision can include multiple outcomes. Have you ever received a “we miss you here’s 10% off” e-mail from a company before? These are the companies that leverage their data to its full potential.
How many customers are interacting, returning to the site, with no purchase? This is an interesting metric to track as it demonstrates interest. You may be able to convert some of these consumers with strategic actions.
How many are interacting and purchasing? Can we track this conversion.
How many are navigating to the site but not purchasing at all. What is the demographic of that customer base like? How did they get to the site? All of this is important to understand before arriving at any key decisions.
Purchase
A customer has successfully purchased something from your e-commerce business. How do we build our customer base according to what the business strategy is, and how do we keep them coming back. Traditionally we think of key performance indicators (KPIs) however, knowing your total sales and profit can only inform so much. We want to dig deeper into the data and come up with advanced custom metrics to measure key processes
Can we come up with advanced data metrics to measure meaningful areas for your business? Instead of total sales and profit, lets look at profit ratio. Can we explore consumer behaviour with machine learning?
Can we analyse customer purchase history, average spend over time — are any variables impacting the spend over time? For example, if we launched a countdown/ waitlist, did we see more traffic and checkout on our e-commerce site? We want to make impactful data driven decisions.
What are the items that the customers are purchasing versus what they are not? Are many customers completing checkout using a certain discount code?
Can we trace some of these purchases to identify the first click that led the customer to checkout? What does that funnel look like? What does a successful journey look like to the customer and how can we enhance or give this more attention than other routes.
Returning Customer
Can we measure customer retention?
Repeat customers — what does a repeat customer mean to you. Can we create a definition and measure this? How does this look like over time? This is very specific to your brand and business. For example, a company that does quarterly releases for luxury items might expect a repeat customer to be someone that shops with them again in 6 months. Some of the best businesses ensure that they treat their loyal customers well and this can be measured in a way that makes sense for you.
Can we analyse the loss rate of the customers (customer churn). This is one of the most valuable metrics to you as a higher churn means that some of your existing strategies may not be working. Churn analysis can allow you to evaluate the full cycle and identify opportunities for improvement.
You may decide to gather feedback from your customers which may even lead to sentiment analysis to understand the tone of the responses. For example, feedback collected from loyal returning clients may indicate that they love the customer service. Sentiment analysis can detect specific feelings and emotions and this would appear to be positive. Knowing the reverse and understanding where negative polarity is the greatest may be pivotal to ensuring that you can address any issues before they impact your brand reputation.
Can analysing customer conversion help you to understand what is working? Can we increase the conversion rate? Does a customer subscription have any correlation to them becoming a repat customer?
Conclusion
Today, we collect data through everything that we do. Making data driven decisions may seem simple — here is a metric, this means that we are doing well however, the story can be more nuanced than that. It is important to understand the e-commerce lifecycle from end to end, analyse the data but also ensure that you can communicate and translate this to valuable actions. Let us help you do this.
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