Understanding your customers is a necessary component of your brand’s growth. Most businesses don’t fully utilize the potential of online platforms and, as a result, make uninformed decisions which limits the business exposure and resultantly, their audience. To truly capitalize on the potential of an ecommerce store, you need to understand the market and gain insights about key practices, as well as your customers.
While having all the information from data management systems alone is enough to be insightful, it is only part of the equation. To have a data-driven ecommerce strategy, you need to align customer insight, perform a competitor analysis, create a business communication plan, and align your resources. Ecommerce businesses that master all the influencing factors can truly sustain themselves in the online market. Here are five ways to make more informed decisions about your ecommerce business:
Tracking Customer Insights
Customer insight refers to the knowledge base of your consumers and keeping a record of their behavior. Customer insights require data filtration, data collection, data processing, and data interpretation. This intel can be used to make an informed decision regarding marketing strategies, product curation, future campaigns, and more.
Here are some examples of what customer insight can include.
- Purchase history
- Demographics
- Browsing behavior
- Split testing
- Survey responses
- Customer support interactions and more
There can be different types of customer insights, which may or may not be relevant for your business. However, each piece of information, when compiled together, forms insightful intel that can be used to make a business decision.
Decide What to Track
Too much information can also make you lose sight of what’s important. This is why it is important to focus on key performance indicators or KPIs, that are most closely related to your business growth. Once you know what to look for, you can use that data to make actionable steps to achieve your desired outcomes.
As a small business, you can investigate certain details about your users that remain true throughout specific durations to arrange year-round campaigns. Here are some areas to consider monitoring.
- Customer Behavior: How are customers interacting with your online store?
- Traffic Volume: Are your products getting the required exposure? What volume becomes profitable?
- Landing Pages: How many users are entering your site, and which touchpoints convert them?
- User Journey: If you are experiencing churn, at what stage of the user cycle it is on?
- Geographic Location: Where are your audience from? How many of them are paying customers?
- E-commerce Conversion Rate: what percentage of your audience is converting into paying customers?
Decide Based on Your Competitors
A major part of sound ecommerce decision-making is learning from your competition. Understanding how your competitors are performing, and what decisions have led to their failure or success can help you better prepare for similar challenges. You need to craft a strategy that monitors your competition on a regular basis and provides you with a competitive landscape. Having this information ensures that your product remains relevant, and you learn by watching.
- Start by identifying key players in your market.
- Perform a simple search acting as a customer to understand your position.
- Use tools to understand their position in the market compared to yours.
- Categorize your competitors into primary, secondary, or tertiary.
- See the type of consumers they are targeting and their message.
- Analyze their key responsibilities, and identify key points.
Use Holistic Intel for Decision Making
You might have your data spread across different channels, and might be monitoring different KPIs on each channel. However, to make a sound decision regarding your ecommerce store – you need to connect the dots. Understanding the impact of your decision as a whole, and in parts can help you understand the viability of it across channels.
It is better to look at the bigger picture and view the performance of each channel, and then forecast its impact on your ecommerce business. Such intel to use in this approach includes:
- Your e-commerce store’s performance itself
- Email Marketing Data
- Customer Service support data
- Google Analytics Enhanced ecommerce data
- Social media marketing tools data and more
Master Your Social Media Channels
The back of any decision in the ecommerce sector depends on support. While we understand the support provided by data, the support of customers and your following is equally important. You need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand their rationale when making your business decision as well. Building a social media presence can help customers connect with your brand, and make faster purchasing decisions.
Instead of relying on data management and collection tools alone, you can learn more about your customers directly from social media. Build a relationship with your followers and increase conversions, create awareness, and a sense of community. All these form an important aspect of decision-making about your ecommerce business and should be considered collectively.
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