By: Dan Radak
There
used to be a time when individuals and companies could run their
ecommerce business by relying on their experience and hunches to
guide them. The competition was weaker both in number and expertise
and all you needed was a good choice of the product(s) to succeed.
As
years went by, the playing field got much more competitive, with more
and more ecommerce stores being opened left and right, often bringing
new weapons to the fight. In such a harsh environment, there is only
one thing ecommerce owners can resort to and that is data. More
precisely, the data-driven approach to making decisions, marketing
their ecommerce store and keeping their customers satisfied.
Data Collection
In
order to organize, analyze and then use the data, you need to first
collect it. The good news is that this is easier to do in the world
of ecommerce than anywhere else, for the simple reason that people
leave all kinds of information when purchasing stuff online. For
example, you can track their browsing and click behavior; their
purchase history; the feedback that they leave in form of comments or
even indirectly. You can even go outside of your actual ecommerce
store and gather data from their social network profiles and the
interactions they engage in online. If done properly, you will have
an abundance of data to rely on.
Data Organization
Your
data collection efforts will result in an
ocean of data that you will have to organize before you can take
the next step of analyzing it. There are a few ways in which you can
go about this. For example, you can organize your insights according
to their priority. Another way to go is to categorize the data you
have collected depending on which aspect of your ecommerce business
will most benefit from this data – pricing models, marketing,
customer retention, etc. The important thing is to identify the data
which you will be able to use so as not to waste time analyzing
things that will mean nothing.
Data Analysis
The
days of data analysis teams who spend their entire working days
crunching the numbers and identifying patterns that you can use are
long behind us. Today, ecommerce businesses employ different types of
analytics tools that provide the decision makers with applicable and
useful insights. For example, various tools can use the data on
clicks and purchases in order to identify times of the day when
certain segments of the market purchase certain items. Or, these
tools can use hue data sets to discover which market segments would
best respond to certain types of marketing.
Making Data-Driven Decisions
Once
actionable insight is gained from all this data, it is important to
have the right people making the right decisions based on these
insights. In large ecommerce companies, different C-suite people will
be using these insights, from the CEO to the CIO and the CMO. If your
ecommerce business is smaller or if you are the sole proprietor, you
will need to know how to act on a number of different fronts once you
receive these insights.
Why Data is the Future
There
are a few reasons why this data-driven approach to ecommerce is the
future. For one, the decisions are based on the actual, existing
situation that is represented by data. This makes it much more likely
that the decision-makers will make only those decisions that will
help their business grow.
Another
reason why data needs to become the main factor in making decisions
is that it can be applied to pretty much every aspect of running an
ecommerce business. For instance, proper data-based insight will
allow the decision-makers to form their pricing model in the most
successful way.
Data
can also drive marketing efforts and even fringe aspects of it such
as the ecommerce's blog. For instance, data can uncover how customers
and potential customers react to cool
WordPress themes you are considering for your ecommerce blog.
Furthermore,
cybersecurity
can also be bolstered by applying the data-based approach, as many
big companies have started doing long time ago.
Last
but definitely not the least with good data-driven practices,
ecommerce owners might actually be able to predict certain trends
that will happen in the future by analyzing past patterns. By doing
this, they can get the upper hand and beat their competition before
they even realize they are in a fight.
Closing Word
There
are good reasons why the entire business world is clamoring about
data, data analytics and data-driven business decision making.
Ecommerce has already become a big part of this storyline and, in the
future, it will only become more involved.
If
you happen to be an owner of an ecommerce business, the sooner you
get on the data
bandwagon, the better you will be off.
###
Dan
Radak is a marketing professional with ten years of
experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the
field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of
e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology
websites and regular contributor to Technivorz.
Comments
Post a Comment