And how your company uses it can change everything.
Let’s cut to the chase. Data, in every shape or form, is the most important thing in business, especially in the digital marketing and e-commerce world. Data informs us of everything we do (or should do), from understanding our leads, prospects, and customers and where we need to invest in marketing to achieve our business goals. While intuition can provide a hunch or spark that starts you down a particular path, it’s through data that you verify, understand, and quantify. According to a survey of more than 1,000 senior executives conducted by PwC, highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making compared to those who rely less on data.
What is valuable e-commerce customer data?
Simply, e-commerce helps brands deepen customer relationships and build better customer experiences. Gender, Geographic location, purchase history, browsing history and interests, these all help brands to build personalized shopping experiences and engage with customers. There are various business intelligence (BI) and data visualization tools and platforms that all companies can use for proper data-driven storytelling—Power BI, SiSense, Tableau, Google Data Studio, BigQuery—to name a few. More sophisticated brands will also want to build out their data warehouses as well as data marts, and create tools to properly store data such as Supermetrics or Five Tran.
Examples of Explored Data (Just the tip of the iceberg):
- Performance-based data from paid media channels and SEO campaigns
- User experience (UX) data
- Historical customer lifestyle, behavioral and purchasing data
- Transactional vs. marketing data
- Third-party intent data
E-commerce Data-Driven Decision Making
Using e-commerce data to inform your decision-making process and validate a course of action before committing to it can enable you to be a more effective entrepreneur or member of your company/organization. The main purpose of data-driven decision making? To lead you (your company) to the right conclusions and help you make the right strategic decisions for your business, depending on your goals. That means the first, most important step is to take a moment to understand what you’re looking for in your data analysis.
What are you looking for?
Think about what your goals are and what questions you want to answer. Are you trying to acquire more new customers, improve retention or make your marketing activities more profitable? That will help you narrow down the right data sources to evaluate and understand which KPIs to focus on.
Bad Data
If your data is not up-to-date or clean, your e-commerce is not worth a damn. If we don’t know how to weed out obsolete data and properly read and analyze good data, we are lost. Regardless of how good our sales team or marketing or operations team is, if we can’t turn data into actionable items and revenues we are wasting our time, energy, and budgets.
Obsess!
From average daily sales to total sales, abandonment rate to conversion rate, return on ad spend (ROAS) to return-on-investment (ROI), one thing most successful e-commerce retailers have in common is they are obsessed with data, making sure their strategic decisions are driven by key metrics. Without understanding the data, you won’t know what’s working, what’s not working, and how you can adjust your strategy to maximize future growth.
Moving Forward with e-commerce Data
Know what you’re looking for: Understand what you’re trying to achieve and what questions you’re trying to answer through your data analysis. This will help you narrow down the right sources and KPIs to focus on. By looking at these metrics on a regular basis, you’ll be better equipped to run a Mediafy.pro data-driven e-commerce business that has a smart strategy behind every move — and a business that experiences continued growth.
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