It’s no secret that big data allows for a better e-commerce strategy. Multi-category retail shops show 43% of online purchases, having been influenced by personalization, a strategy made possible through big data. With so much business liable to be influenced by a crafted marketing approach, it is in every eCommerce business’s best interest to incorporate big data into their strategy.
Among the benefits of successful big data use are the abilities of a business to understand customers, create a narrative around customer experience, and personalize content to meet audience needs. All of these components stand to improve your overall e-commerce business platform.
Through the following steps, you can incorporate big data into your e-commerce strategy and build a successful business model for our increasingly data-heavy world.
1. Track the Right Data
Successfully incorporating big data starts with generating your data. There are a few ways you can go about this, but when it comes to data, the more, the merrier.
First, you can begin a process of data mining and business analytics. This approach relies on a business tapping into every available data pool — examining inventory data, sales behaviors, log-on times, bounce rates, and much, much more. Skilled data analysts can delve into data, accumulating a picture that illustrates a broad range of customer trends and preferences.
Secondly, you can utilize a host of free online tools to help generate a portfolio of customer data. From analytics pulled from Google Analytics or webpage hosting sites like WordPress and SquareSpace, you can begin better to understand the needs and preferences of your intended audience.
Third, you can pay for data subscription services that allow you to tap into insights generated by third parties. This won’t be ideal in getting a better scope on your existing audience, but the information gleaned could allow you to access previously unthought-of demographic segments with targeted marketing.
Data is the future of marketing, an exciting trend that is likely to boost your revenues. Tracking the right data means setting goals for your business. Customer behavioral data will help you understand when and where to reach your intended audience, and then marketing strategies can be employed for greater outreach.
2. Create Customer Personas
Big data gives you the tools to create personas for your intended audience that can help you better target a marketing strategy. By applying this information to customer outreach, you can craft content around segmented groups that describe who your audience is. This approach relies on the successful accumulation of data. Once you have enough to go on, you can build profiles that match almost any intended buyer.
The process of segmentation and building customer portfolios starts with analysis. Who is using your product? What are their professions, their hobbies, their demographics? Every bit of information you have can help you create marketable messaging. For example, if you sell computer parts and understand a portion of your market is professional. At the same time, another is made up of hobbyist consumers, your messaging to each of these groups will need to differ.
Once you have customer profiles in mind, you can use AI to automate the messaging that goes out to audiences on social media and in paid advertising across the web. Digital marketing tools read for data points that will assist you in successfully targeting your messaging. This allows you to sit back and let automation and big data take the lead for marketing success.
3. Tell a Story
Online marketing is a perfect match for any business with the application of good data and the right analytical work. However, all the data in the world will only do you so much good. To better apply that data, you need to construct a narrative around your customer’s needs, wants, and challenges.
Leverage all the information and customer demographics you have to answer the questions: Why do your customers need your product? What keeps them interested? What could you do better?
Much of this information can be gained from email surveys, social media polls, and other methods of tracking customer satisfaction and experience. Once you have enough feedback, you can improve processes and products to betters serve customers. In turn, this assists you in creating marketing messaging that appeals directly to customer needs and challenges.
Big data may be the key that starts the car but to drive your marketing strategy to succeed. It would be best if you told a compelling story about your customers and products.
4. Personalize Your Content
Epsilon found that 80% of customers are more willing to purchase from a company that offerers a personalized ad experience. This underscores the need for an effective data strategy that applies everything you have learned about your customers into targeted marketing that reaches customers at an individual level.
AI tools that can craft this level of personalization are a must-have for starting or managing an online business. Think of how Amazon uses personalization to generate sales. Depending on the browsing history and other customer data, Amazon accumulates, it recommends products to the customer based on what the compounded data says about the customer. Personas are essential in helping the company’s algorithms provide the best possible recommendations to customers. In turn, Amazon has propelled itself forward as an e-commerce giant.
Big data is a top trend of the digital age, one which every e-commerce business must embrace to generate personalized content successfully. This means leveraging your customer profiles to enhance the products and messaging they see, showing them you understand their needs and challenges.
5. Constantly Reassess Your Strategy
Like any marketing strategy, e-commerce success is a process. Luckily, big data is a tool that helps directly in that process. With analytics that allows you to see exactly what you’re doing right or wrong through often real-time feeds, you can continuously improve your marketing strategy.
Track data, craft personas, tell a story, and personalize your content—but keep an eye on your analytics all the time. Maybe a strategy works perfectly in one quarter but falters in another. Successfully incorporating big data means learning from every success and failure to innovate your marketing techniques continually.
