The Importance of Data in Ecommerce and How to Use It to Your Advantage

Benefits of Data in Ecommerce

It’s unbelievable how most entrepreneurs nowadays use only around 0.5% of all the big data at their disposal to better their business operations. A huge part of data is left there unused in proprietary external tools and analytics software solutions.

With every new day, machine-learning technologies are getting better and faster. The way they gather data and transform it into meaningful insights is being improved constantly.

As a result, once scattered pieces of information are now turning into actionable insights that eCommerce companies can make great use of.

Now, if you don’t have time to spend on data analytics, you can always find an eCommerce business broker to help you buy an already profitable site. They will break down data and transform it into meaningful insights to find the perfect match for your needs.

However, if you want to do everything from scratch on your own website, below you can find more reasons why you should never underestimate data and how you can use it to help your business achieve outstanding results.

Benefits of data in eCommerce

Realizing what your customers want out of your products, knowing their pain points and how to solve them is crucial if you are hungry for success in the world of eCommerce.

Companies invest millions of dollars in market research to get a better understanding of what consumers want. And it isn’t always easy to gather this data. However, it is worth the effort.

Cross-sell and up-sell campaigns

Back in the day, the customer buying journey was linear, but things have changed.

Customers switch between websites, use Google to look for promo codes and go to trusted online sources for reviews. Once they are done with their own research, they come back to your website (if they are satisfied) to make a purchase.

However, that purchase does not necessarily need to be made from the same device they used to dig up as much info as possible regarding your business.

This is one of the reasons why companies work day and night to develop good website marketing data tools to keep up with the changing habits of consumers. Tracking the behaviour is essential in this game.

A good algorithm that is found in these tools has no problems gauging and churning online behaviours. The new-gen analytics tools can compile that data to give you a better depth of customer personas.

And once that is achieved, all the focus can be shifted to improving cross-sell and up-sell campaigns, thus making the most out of your sales and marketing efforts.

Product development based on data

Scrum Product Development Strategy
Scrum Product Development Strategy

As a business owner, it is never easy to decide what your next product will be. Whether you are just a reseller or your company develops unique products that are only yours – this is a complex issue for all eCommerce business owners.

And even when an entrepreneur has an idea of what the next product will look like, the numbers show that odds do not always work in their favour. A whopping 75% of products sold to the general public fail within a year or two. This is a huge reason why you need to learn how to interpret data gathered by data analytics tools.

Data analytics platforms can provide essential insights regarding product trends. Every slight hunch needs to be backed up by data that shows you what people are buying at what price.

This is the only way to dominate the development stages of your products.

But how can I use data to help my business?

To better understand all the data you are pulling, it may be wise to combine different sources of data and then try to understand behavioural intent.

Only when you figure out the behavioural intent, will you be able to identify the problem and start working on fixing it.

Identify problematic pages

You have most likely experienced an increase in visitors to your website, but not an increase in conversions at the same time, right?

This happens to all eCommerce businesses at least once or twice during their lifetime. Even though the attention is there, the profits stagnate. To identify the problem, in this case, you should take a look at the pages’ exit rates.

High-exit rate pages show the place where your visitors decided not to become customers. Maybe they have a problem finding your size chart, or perhaps they believe that your shipping is overpriced.

Anyway, the first step to solving the problem is to find the exact place where they bounced.

Figure out the reason

Now you need to find out why your visitors are abandoning the website at such a crucial point.

You could run a quick exit survey and see what the problem is. Exit surveys allow marketers to target potential customers at the right moment. However, you need to provide the right questions if you want this to work.

Ask questions relevant to your website’s UX, and you shall find out why customers are leaving. This gives you a chance to offer them last-minute help before they leave.

Analyze sources of traffic

The traffic sources to your website may be the reason why someone is leaving too early.

There are two most common types of traffic sources:

  1. Organic traffic (when a user finds you through Google)
  2. Referral traffic (when someone clicks on a link to your website on another website)

Different traffic sources come from different contexts. You can never truly control the context visitors have from these traffic sources.

Some may come from bad reviews, while some may come from recommendations.

Luckily, various software solutions can also let you see the context by pulling the correct data. That way, you will have better insight and be able to make better decisions regarding your website traffic.

Utilize your CRM platform to the maximum

CRM Solutions, Tools and Softwares
Customer relationship management Solutions, Tools, and Softwares

A customer relationship management system covers a company’s interaction with current and future customers. CRM relies on data, but most of that data is contact information, the latest contacts, products bought, and so on.

However, thanks to big data techniques, it is also possible to process, store, and analyze vast amounts of unstructured data not supplied by the customer and use it to gain valuable insights.

For instance, if you happen to use the Salesforce CRM, you can lay your hands on invaluable pieces of information with the help of Salesforce ETL tools.

This kind of tool helps you automatically pull data out of Salesforce. Even a beginner can use this type of tool to support a big data development project.

Final thoughts

Analytics and gathered data can help you out quite a bit if you read and use them properly. When you understand the right data, when you structure it and display it correctly, you can identify problematic points and fix them.

In turn, this can lead to better business sales revenue and improved customer satisfaction scores. Ultimately, it is vital for all ambitious entrepreneurs to understand better the critical business and customer data to utilize analytics tools.

If you haven’t started with this already, rest assured that your competition has. So, what are you waiting for?

Importance of data in eCommerce
Advantages of data in eCommerce.

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