Wondering if you could figure out well in advance what customers are likely to prefer and what pricing strategy should you apply to maximize profits? Data analytics is the key. Data has become the fuel for every industry these days and this stands true for the eCommerce market as well. However, majority of eCommerce websites fail at gaining foresight simply because they don’t rely on a huge set of data they are sitting on. As a marketer, one could be phenomenal in content, email marketing or social media strategy but if you lack the expertise in decision making and spending the right amount of time on analytics, this could result in losing resources and money.
To better understand customer analytics, one should be better prepared to handle data and asking the right questions about eCommerce performance, and integrating the analysis into eCommerce strategy.
Customer analytics
Every day, millions of customers shop online and trillions of people surf the web. These imprints online are potential leads for growing businesses. All this data is getting collected at a point resulting in the creation of data logs that indicate meaningful insights into customer preferences. Ecommerce retailers can use this data to improve their marketing strategies and comprehend well in advance the shift in buyer preference or customer behavior.
To capture eCommerce analytics, a wide range of metrics are covered. These relate to the full customer journey, discovery, acquisition, conversion, retention and even advocacy which once collected could be translated into insights, charts, or key statistics for business.
All forms of marketing initiatives have some form of customer analytics attached to it. Some of these include
- Number of daily pageviews
- Users who click on a featured homepage offer
- Percentage of users who bounce versus the number of customers who stay to visit the page
- The average amount of time spent on a page
All these metrics can help understand the performance of the website.
Knowledge is Power
As a small-to-medium online store owner, your resources are finite, which means time and burn rate are vital factors to your success. Without having knowledge about which marketing activities are working and ones that are not yielding results leads to losing both time and money. Therefore, access to statistical information from all areas of online marketing and sales activities gives an advantage over competitors if this is translated and converted to meaningful insights. Knowing information on which products are working enables you to drop certain products or make strategic changes to your pricing.
How customer analytics address some of the key areas of concerns
Marketers have access to a plethora of online channels when it comes to deciding where to focus time and budget on. However, based on the nature of service most of the effective channels which might work for you do not necessarily work for others. This is where data analytics can answer your questions related to:
Which channel is driving higher user penetration?
In the bid for customer acquisition, brands are interested in knowing which channels are making the majority of customer penetration. As a result, demand generation efforts focus on channels that drive new customers. This is where the use of customer analytics tells the marketer precisely where the new traffic is coming from. That said, it will vary from business to business which is why it is essential to leverage data analytics and understand where to spend money for customer acquisition if the effort is not going to generate enough revenue.
One such channel is Amazon. Several sellers use guide to sell on Amazon and also rely on its own Amazon Brand Analytics which provides amazon sellers a better understanding of their business. The analytics tools offer specialized reports for repeat purchasing behavior and amazon search term reports.
Which is the highly effective customer journey from awareness to advocacy?
Customer journey essentially details the steps a user takes from the first touchpoint with your product to the final destination of making the purchase. Customer analytics helps the retailer understand through which channels the customer is most likely to find your brand and additionally which touchpoints lead to conversion and eventually advocacy.
The attribute model is used which tells the marketer how much the web page, resources and other content resonates with the user by examining and detailing how often the point served as a touchpoint in the customer journey.
How behaviors are correlated with a high retention rate
We all know repeat customers are our most valuable assets. Therefore, analyzing the behavior of repeated and loyal customers is a great way to understand your chance of success in the market. Segmentation of the customers is one way to view multi-purchase and most loyal customers. Then their behavior let us know what contents or pages they are interacting with most. With such information, one can improve retention rates better.
Bottomline
Customer Analytics has now become the most precious asset one can own. However, merely owning the assets and not tracking it from time to time will lose its essence. The data needs to be tracked regularly, influence decision making, help implement changes and create a system of data management for a successful eCommerce business.
