If you are looking for practical ways to refine your marketing strategy and drive better results from your e-commerce website this year, then there is no better place to look than your own data. Systematically monitoring and analysing your data will give you a better understanding about what your customers want and how they behave, helping you make better informed decisions, avoid wasted expenditure, and achieve a better ROI from marketing. In this article, we’ll look at how to harness data to optimise and improve your e-commerce marketing strategy.
What Data Should You Track?
E-commerce businesses generate a wide variety of data points, and often in huge volumes, so what are the most important metrics to focus on? We recommend starting with the following areas:
1. Customer Behaviour Metrics:
Any data relating to how customers interact with your website and other sales channels, including the pages and products they browse, click on, add to their cart, or abandon, are essential for optimising your e-commerce marketing strategy. Tools like Google Analytics, heat map tools, and marketing automation platforms like HubSpot can give you crucial visibility into behavioural trends. Heat maps are great because they reveal how users interact visually with your website. This is important because it shows where you should be spending your time and money, and the channels you need to target for the best results.
2. Revenue And Sales Trends:
It’s important to evaluate what products are selling, when they sell, and at what price point. However, not only are snapshots or month-end figures important, but also annual and quarterly trends. Analyse these figures for patterns in purchasing habits, such as changes in average order value, seasonal spikes, or the impact of external factors, such as economic fluctuations. This can help you plan sales, forecast the economic landscape for product launches, and plan your business initiatives for optimal results, and also help you better understand your customer’s pain points when creating your marketing content.
3. Website Data:
Your business e-commerce website is a gold mine of potentially valuable metrics, including your traffic sources, bounce rates for individual pages and products, session durations, and individual page views. These metrics indicate how well your website (or other sales channel) is engaging your visitors and converting them into paying customers, opening the door to targeted improvements.
4. Customer Demographics And Segmentation:
If you haven’t done so already, invest in a good CRM that lets you track information about who your customer segments are and where they fit in the wider market, including geographical location, interests, income bracket, gender, age, job, and other factors. Understanding these factors can help you create targeted campaigns and tailor your value proposition to specific markets.
5. Marketing Performance Data:
Paid adverts, email campaigns, your blog, social media performance and other metrics will show you what is working (and what isn’t!) in your current marketing strategy.
How To Make The Best Use Of Data
Combining these datasets will help create a solid foundation for a data driven marketing strategy and continual improvement. On its own, however, although this data might be interesting, it isn’t particularly useful unless you can interpret it to discover actionable trends and insights. This can be done manually, and some people dedicate entire careers to data and statistical analysis. However, you can also save time and effort by using a high-quality data analysis tool – many automation platforms, including HubSpot, now include these tools and features as a standard part of their service offering, giving businesses unparalleled access to high quality data analysis.
Spotting behavioural patterns: when looking at a graph, spreadsheet, or datasheet, the most important thing to look for are behavioural patterns. For e-commerce optimisation, you should look carefully for any factors that might be causing friction in your customer experience, such as a high bounce rate on popular product pages, or higher than usual levels of cart abandonment. These are the areas that, for most businesses, are the most deserving of immediate investment, and are the most likely to yield short-term financial improvements.
Applying Data Insights Optimise Your Strategy
There are several ways in which you can use data insights to make more informed decisions across your e-commerce channels, for instance:
- Personalise your marketing campaigns – by dividing customers into groups or segments based on their behaviours and demographics (e.g. high-value or repeat shoppers), you can create personalised email drip feed campaigns and content strategies for each buyer group. For instance, you could use your insights to send product recommendations based on a customer’s previous purchases or browsing history, or give your repeat customers loyalty-based promotions to maximise lifetime customer value. New visitors, on the other hand, might be tempted to convert through introductory offers or free informative content.
- Improve your ad targeting: abandoned cart data allows you to ‘re-target’ customers on some platforms with specific products they have used, or target lookalike audiences based on your best performing customer demographics. Meta Ads and Google Ads both allow detailed audience targeting based on this data.
- Improve your website: reduce bounce rate on problematic pages by optimising your product descriptions and other content, improving site loading speeds, adding videos and gated content, and creating clear CTAs. If your heat maps show that many users click ‘dead elements’ – such as non-clickable images – consider redesigning these pages to maximise engagement.
- Optimise your inventory management: you can use sales trend data to increase stock on your bestselling product lines before peak periods, and discount items with low demand to avoid overstocking.
Making Continual Improvements
A big mistake that some e-commerce businesses make is to treat data analysis and optimisation as a one-off or periodic exercise. Occasional number crunching and deep analysis can yield good results, but for the best long-term success, it’s beneficial to incorporate data monitoring and analytics into your ongoing improvement strategy. This will help you to make micro-adjustments to your marketing strategy in response to emerging trends, which is always easier and less expensive than making widescale changes. Ongoing data analysis also gives you greater agility to respond to rapidly emerging trends, market opportunities, and challenges, leading to better long-term efficiency and higher revenues.
Find Out More
At JDR, we help e-commerce businesses reach more of their target customers, make more sales, and increase average order value. To find out more about our services, please get in touch today by clicking here.
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