Data Strategies to Improve Your eCommerce Business

To make the most informed eCommerce business decisions, you must leverage data. The data you gather about your customers is essential for making beneficial choices. 

The issue with using data is that it’s difficult to gather and interpret, especially when you sell on multiple platforms. 

To organize your data in the most useful way, you must develop one source. It’s much easier to make smart decisions when your real-time data is all in one place. Ultimately, this will help you make better decisions faster and boost your profits. 

Data and eCommerce Decision Making 

Data is the tool you need to make smart eCommerce decisions. When you rely on data, you rely on evidence to make decisions, not guesswork. Many eCommerce executives already use data to make decisions, and it will continue to become a more and more important resource. Here are the ways that data helps when making decisions.

Customer Preferences

You want to make decisions that align with your customers’ wants. To determine what customers what on a detailed level, you’ll need to look at the data. Data can pinpoint where customers are leaving your website or sales funnel. By monitoring data, you can figure out which new products would be profitable and eliminate those that are not. 

Effective Marketing Strategies

There are a ton of marketing tactics that people recommend, but not all of them will provide a return for your business. You should use the marketing strategies that will drive costs down and return on investment up. Data will help you find out which marketing tactics are working best for your business and which may not be worth continuing. You can combine all of your eCommerce data to see which advertising platforms are the most effective. 

Smart Upselling and Cross-Selling 

Acquiring new customers is far more expensive than keeping the ones you already have. By focusing on your current customers, you can increase the lifetime value and average order value. One of the best ways to do that is by upselling and cross-selling. Data will help you discover which products are the most popular, and which products are bought together. 

Optimize Conversions

Without data, you are shooting in the dark about why people buy your products. You can’t be sure if the copy is to thank, the ad, your landing page design, or something else entirely. Data reveals what is and is not working at every stage. This makes it clear where you need to make changes so that you can optimize your funnel for conversions. 

The Big Problem with Data

Data fuels smart eCommerce decisions, so why can’t all companies be profitable? There’s one big obstacle that prevents many eCommerce companies from using data effectively: centralizing data. 

It can be quite difficult to centralize the approach to capturing and analyzing data. Scattered data is not easy to use for analytics, and it won’t help you much. To get the full picture from the data, you need to organize it in a central location. 

Despite knowing this, many companies struggle to find a reasonable solution to consolidate data. One of the most time-consuming methods is to manually copy the data from multiple sources. The more channels involved in your funnel, the more difficult it will become to interpret the data in each separate part. Additionally, manually moving the data is prone is human error and will consume excessive resources. 

How to Get Your Data in One Place

Fortunately, there are several ways you can aggregate your data into one place. Below we’ll address the most commonly used options as well as their pros and cons. 

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a manual way to combine all data. You can create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Excel. Some companies turn to a spreadsheet because it’s simple to use, easy to analyze, shareable, and does not have a learning curve. 

However, spreadsheets are quite limited in features. These limitations become huge issues as your company grows. Spreadsheets have a physical limitation, their limited cell space. You cannot perform complex queries, and they’re not ideal for historical data. Additionally, the process is manual, taking up a lot of time and effort. 

Even so, spreadsheets might be beneficial for companies that are very small, have limited marketing, and need a data aggregator to implement immediately. 

Data Visualization Tools

Data visualization tools organize your data visually. Some examples are Power Bi, Google Data Studio, or Tableau. They offer high-level insights through automated dashboards, and they’re pretty easy to understand. You don’t have to crunch data, you can see insights at a glance. 

On the other hand, these tools can oversimplify the data, missing nuances in data. You won’t get to see the “less important” data, and you won’t be able to interact with the raw data when making decisions. 

However, these tools are good for data analysis when you need fast insight. They’re good for those who are starting out with using data to guide decisions and don’t require a trained analytics team. Data visualization can also be a good supplement to raw data. 

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is a single location for ALL of your data, including new and historical data. Data warehouses are a complete solution for data aggregation, with no limits on the amount of data you can store. They provide instant access to data, and space for historical data. 

As you can imagine, data warehouses are expensive. They’re not beginner-friendly, as they require SQL knowledge and require complex setup. 

If you’re looking to quickly scale your business, a data warehouse is what you need. However, you have to make sure you have the time and financial resources to get one. But, you can rest assured that your decisions are backed by data. 

Power eCommerce with Data

Accelerate your business growth with data. To get the most from your data and make the smartest decisions, you must gather your data into a single centralized location. You can always copy and paste, but this is time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, focus on finding a data aggregation solution that suits your business needs. 

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