IN the digital age, marketing is a whole new game.
In the past, companies needing to adjust their ad campaigns would struggle to find relevant data to help make the right decisions.
Today, access to “big data” such as customer demand, website clicks, and user behavior patterns — at the click of a button — makes managing campaigns easy.
With revolutionary marketing strategy enabled by big data, brands are enjoying increased profit and reduction in cost.
Moreover, there are various ways e-commerce companies can utilize big data to improve sales:
1.Know your customer better
The first step of selling successfully is to build a buyer persona because you will need to understand who your customers are and what they expect from your products and services. With Big Data Analytics Solutions in place, merchants can get a genuine picture of the customer behavior through an accurate analysis of their browsing behavior and shopping patterns. It becomes easy to comprehend their inclination towards specific products, categories, and brands by tracking their touch points and the website areas they access repeatedly and spends maximum time on. Also, you can get to know where you need to improve by identifying gaps and trends towards cart abandonment.
2.Deliver better shopping experiences
Without any doubt, knowing your customer better empowers you to deliver better shopping experiences. A Big Data Analytics tool enables to gather and analyze voluminous data from disparate sources including website analytics, social media data, email marketing, and more for a comprehensive analysis. Knowing what works and what does not across all the points of customer interaction gets you on top when it comes to polishing the shopping experiences for your buyers. The best way would be to tweak your processes, products, and content to align with the buyer expectations.
3.Improve the level of customer service
Another way in which Big Data Analytics can enhance e-commerce businesses is by helping them improve customer service. In the first place, it is crucial to understand the significance of customer service for boosting your sales. Even if you invest all the best efforts in e-commerce web development and come up with an impressive product catalog, you will be unable to achieve your targets unless you deliver excellence in customer services. Data analysis gets you the knowledge about the gaps in your product quality and service delivery; so you know how you can serve the shoppers to an extent that they have no complaints and come back for more.
4.Predictive analysis for better planning
Beyond just getting you closer to the customers and streamlining the sales function, data analytics can do much more. These offer rich insights that provide a greater depth in the understanding and alignment of the entire operations. Predictive analysis can be leveraged to plan and manage operations such as inventory and supply chain. You can gather a fair idea about the future trends in demand and create sales and pricing strategies to maximize profits.
5.Ease and security of online payments
Online payments are a key aspect of selling through e-commerce. While you must offer diverse payment options for the shoppers, there should also be the assurance that their transactions and financial details are secure through the process. By analyzing the payments’ data, the store can understand the behavior of the users to find out the most popular payment methods that they must integrate into their e-commerce store for maximizing sales. Further, these insights also helps them to distinguish genuine users from fraudsters, which can be of key importance for preventing online frauds and building trust for the store.
6.Accurate trend predictions
As often witnesses on the popular e-commerce giant, Amazon, well-placed recommendations of products during browsing sessions could make a difference towards shifting more goods.
Analyzing how one purchase corresponds to another could really help derive an added insight on what to upsell next.
7.Predicting demand and supply
E-commerce companies struggle to manage inventory and match demand and supply accurately if they’re not using big data.
Large companies use big data to understand and predict which customers will demand what products at what time — and they can move their inventory accordingly, ahead of time.
Doing so not only helps the companies better manage their resources but also optimize the delivery times for the buyers, ensuring a better customer experience.
In the future, with the internet of things (IoT) making a debut in the industrial world, e-commerce players will be able to gather even more data about demand and supply of their products, making inventory optimization and inventory-triggered sale-strategies more commonplace.
8. On-page improvements
Vendors these days are tracking to everything customers do when they’re on the website, including mouse movements and keystrokes. These data are then analyzed to predict the next possible move.
Once the likeliest move is figured out, businesses can execute specific actions to provide the customer with the right information at the right time, prevent the customer from moving away from the page with custom-made promotional items.
And with a bigger data set (i.e more visitors to the website), a more robust trend could be established for which appropriate strategy could be put in place.
In short, big companies are already tapping into big data to maximize profits, and as the technology develops over time, it is becoming evident that smaller companies could also leverage it to increase their revenues.
And along with integrating other increasingly accessible technologies such as AI and machine learning, big data could propel small businesses to the next level in terms of growth and earnings.
Conclusion
Considering these amazing benefits, it does not come as a surprise that Big Data is fast becoming one of the most significant e-commerce trends today. Unless you are willing and able to adopt a solution that leverages the immense potential of data, you cannot expect your business to grow and achieve your targets. The best thing about this technology is its comprehensiveness; from enabling better customer satisfaction to preventing frauds, and empowering better decision-making, there is much that it can do.
