Although e-commerce has grown massively over the last decade, it seems as if the trend isn’t slowing down. In fact, as more and more brick-and-mortar stores close, we see increasing numbers of businesses opening up online or moving their trading from a physical presence to a digital one. With everyone so busy these days and consumer expectations about price, availability, and shipping higher than ever, e-commerce stores seem ideally suited to cater to the way people browse and buy.
However, whether you own a current online store or want to open one this year, it’s important to keep in mind that you’ll have plenty of competition to go up against. As a result, you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons. One great way to do this, and ensure you boost your e-commerce conversion rate at the same time, is to utilize big data.
With the easy availability of technology which can capture, track, and analyze large sets of information now, there’s no excuse not to use numbers to cater better to consumer desires and to grow your venture exponentially in turn. Read on for some tips you can follow today to take advantage of big data.
Offer More Personalization
For starters, one of the best ways you can use data is to offer more personalization to customers. Take analytics information and other details about your customers and the way they shop, and use this to give them an individual browsing and purchasing experience.
By examining some of the ways consumers shop with you, such as for different occasions and motivations, and via numerous touchpoints, you can better understand how to offer them content, products, services, specials and processes which suit their needs. In turn, this will mean more sales conversions for you.
As an example, you can use the data collected about clients to reward them for their loyalty. After they have shopped with you multiple times, you’ll have an idea of what kinds of things they buy, what price points they shop at, when they are online, and more. Use these details, then, to tailor promotions to people, plus product suggestions (e.g., through a “If you like this product, you might also like…” function, or specific email offers), newsletter content, shipping services, etc.
Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Next, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, you likely get frustrated when you analyze your shopping-cart abandonment rates and wonder why so many people put things in their carts but never complete the transactions. While this is a regular part of online shopping and something you have to get used to, it’s still important to continually look for ways to reduce your abandonment rates.
Big data can really help with this. Since customers tend to leave their shopping carts for all sorts of reasons (such as costly shipping or return fees, difficult-to-use checkouts, slow shipping times, a lack of trust in the website, and more), analyzing data can help you pinpoint the most significant issues turning shoppers off.
There might be one major pain point for people or multiple problems which you can work on correcting. Once you address these though — and this can be done through changing the functionality of your site or by providing shoppers with offers to incentivize them to convert — you should immediately begin to see an improvement in your sales numbers.
Boost Customer Service
The level of customer service you provide through your online store is just as important, if not more so than that offered by a standard bricks-and-mortar shop. As such, any way you can find to improve the support you provide to consumers is going to help you boost sales.
You can use big data to work on your customer service since the information you analyze will tell you more about your clients. You’ll get a better idea of who they are, what they want, how they found out about your business and other essential details. With this data in hand, you can then improve the experience they have when they interact with your brand at each touchpoint along their shopping journey.
Also, by keeping track of questions people ask via social media, email, or phone, you can find out what kind of information you need to put on your site to better explain processes or product details, or when you might need to make team members available to chat (e.g., at night time if most of your customers are online then).
Furthermore, by analyzing shopping-cart behavior, and marketing and sales results, you can learn which types of offers most motivate customers, where they get frustrated by a lack of service, information, or product availability, and what methods of communication they prefer.
