So you want to boost eCommerce sales, but you’ve tried everything from paid search to SEO and still aren’t seeing results?
As the ongoing pandemic continues to push brands to realign their strategies and find digital solutions to increase sales, marketers across all industries are struggling to address critical business-driving issues.
If you’re embracing this digital transformation, good on you, but if you’re struggling to make it work, my guess is you’re neglecting to answer questions that are critical in these times of uncertainty.
Break down those silos
If you’re working across siloed and disparate systems, you need to cut that sh*t out.
It’s no surprise most brands boast marketing efforts that span across various channels — social media, email, paid ads, etc. — but without the technology in place to effectively tie together multichannel campaigns, it can be difficult to analyse your results.
In addition to this, if you have teams managing various data sets divided across different teams throughout the business, developing a holistic view on performance can be even more challenging.
While breaking down silos seems like a no-brainer, it can be hard to foster a cross-functional workflow and completely change the way your brand operates.
But hey — they say identifying you have a problem is the first step to recovery, right?
Embrace omnichannel analytics
If you’re implementing a multi-channel approach (if you’re not, shame on you), the key to success in tracking your data is: unification.
Meet omnichannel — the marketing strategy that seamlessly integrates various communication channels and uses the customer perspective to optimise the consistency of a brand’s message.
But the real key in an omnichannel approach is using data from multiple channels to improve eCommerce operations and most importantly, the customer experience.
Ecommerce is rigorously competitive, which means understanding what your customers want before they even know they want it is crucial to stand out in a sea of similar brands.
With omnichannel analytics, you can break down barriers and better understand your customers, manage their journey, personalise what they see and optimise your offering.
Get to know your customers
The biggest mistake a brand can make is thinking they know everything about their target audience and neglecting to use data to back their inferences.
Don’t fall into this trap! Instead, utilise analytics tools.
Analytics offer up new opportunities to identify segments and microsegments by utilising advanced clustering and scoring techniques.
These segments can shed light on how to better target, predict behaviours, optimise offers and discard irrelevant efforts that waste your resources.
Social analytics are also becoming more relevant for eCommerce. While they provide more information to help enrich segmentation, first-party data from your company’s website can be used to correlate results.
Manage the customer journey
Ahh – it seems to always come back to the customer journey, doesn’t it!
But let’s take a look at how analytics plays a role in it.
Weaving together multi-channel touch points your consumers interact with overtime, customer journey analytics connects millions of events from your customer point-of-view to create a data-driven approach to marketing.
From the initial encounter with your mobile-friendly ad to their first online purchase, tracking customer’s behaviour and intent as they interact with various touch points can indicate conversions to sales, customer satisfaction and efforts to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Personalise the experience
Personalisation is how you’ll turn acquisition into advocacy, giving your brand a one-way-ticket to higher conversions.
Personalisation analytics can identify relevant attributes and spit out custom experiences based on the individual’s expectations. By providing customers with a seemingly tailored experience, you can establish a more intimate relationship with consumers.
Optimise your inventory
With omnichannel analytics, you can actually optimise your inventory based on predictive data that is fueled by historical trends. It can prove to be important in ‘instant gratification’ situations, where having the right product in the right place at the right time can be more challenging than finding the perfect wedding dress. When you analyse what people are buying, you can establish patterns that indicate what you should be stocking your virtual shelves with.
You can trust the data
Just like Shakira’s hips, the data doesn’t lie and while it’s easy to get distracted by the way data moves across channels and platforms, it’s important to have a grasp on the data that matters — and the data that doesn’t.
By focusing on the impact matrix, or the idea that not all data holds the same value, you can take action and drive outcomes through prioritising the platforms that have greater scale.
When you find something good that’s working, double down. You’ve really only made a mistake when you keep the data you’ve collected from showing you a better way.
