Every action taken on the internet leaves a trail of data, one that, when used correctly, can transform the way your business operates. Considering that the creation, collection, and analysis of data increased 5000% between 2010 and 2020, it’s no surprise that 94% of companies say that data is now essential to their business growth.
Nowhere is this more apparent in the eCommerce industry, a sector that relies on audience information and consumer habits to continuously streamline its business processes.
In this article, we’ll be discussing data-driven shopper insights, demonstrating how they’re leading eCommerce into a new era rooted in data tracking.
What Are Data-Driven Shopper Insights?
When a potential customer clicks on your website, every action they take begins to generate a deep pool of analyzable data. From the amount of time they spend on a landing page to the navigation route through your products they take, everything is cataloged.
Shopper insights peel back the curtain on this data, processing, formulating, and presenting it in an understandable way. Instead of an incomprehensible stream of data, shopper insights software will create an easy-to-read picture of the data on a certain site.
Using these shopper insights, a marketing manager receives a concrete understanding of the site they’re working on, with facts like product engagement, page popularity, and page bounce rate helping illustrate the site’s success.
From there, instead of making random decisions in an attempt to boost engagement or sales, a marketing manager can analyze the data and directly see which pages need refinement and which products are standout successes.
In the world of eCommerce, with millions of variations of similar products, companies need to do anything they can to stand out and create the very best user experience. Data-driven shopper insights give businesses the tools and knowledge they need to then figure out actionable steps to improve their online business, helping them stay ahead of competitors and secure clients.
In fact, after taking action due to shopper insights, businesses are 23x more likely to convert a potential customer into a sale, and 6x more likely to get a return customer. With the promise of reduced bounce rates, higher customer LTV, and boosted conversion rates, shopper insights are a vital tool in the modern eCommerce landscape.
Making the most of data will allow you to take action to boost the success of your business. Instead of stabbing in the dark hoping to make a change that triggers more sales, data provides a detailed map of factual evidence that you can follow towards progress.
To demonstrate the power of shopper insights, let’s discuss three central ways that shopper insights can improve your eCommerce business.
1. Use Shopper Insights to Monitor Demand and Industry Trends
Currently, it’s predicted that there are anywhere between 12-24 million eCommerce stores active on the internet. Even taking the lower range of these figures, that’s still potentially tens of millions of products that your store has to directly compete with. With the sheer quantity of stores and products out there, it can be a little overwhelming knowing where to start.
By taking advantage of shopper insights, you’ll be able to further understand what sorts of products are currently trending in your industry. By looking for a particular niche, you’ll be able to see which businesses are currently performing best, as well as which products are their best sellers.
Understanding product trends allows you to stay on top of the wave, producing and marketing products that are more likely to sell well according to empirical data evidence.
Alongside looking at competitors, you can turn these tools onto your own site, tracking product performance to better understand which of your products sell best for certain periods. With retroactive histories, you can preemptively stock up on certain products if you know they sell well in a particular season.
With knowledge of customer data comes the ability to capitalize upon it, making sure your store is always ready to take advantage of trends, reposition products based on popularity, and boost sales by pandering directly to your audience.
2. Optimize Your Search Strategy
It’s no secret that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a superpower on the internet. From increasing your ranking on the search results pages to boosting your brand’s visibility and authenticity, it pays to invest in SEO.
One of the central pieces of data that shopper insights reveal is competitor keyword targeting. By understanding which keywords your competitors are currently ranking for, you’ll be able to emulate and supersede their strategy, creating a comprehensive SEO campaign that boosts you to the top of the Google rankings.
If you understand what’s working well for others, you’ll be able to reposition your site, changing the on-page SEO to begin to rank for a range of related keywords to your store. With these analytical tools, a site can also see which keywords produce the most profit for them, using this information to intensify its focus on this content.
While most sites automatically log the number of users that visit the store, the addition of shopper insight tools will allow you to determine exactly where they accessed your site from, seeing which keywords they typed into Google to arrive at your store.
Once you know this, and the words used to access your direct competitors’ stores, you’ll be able to execute a more efficient SEO strategy, increasing your site’s visibility, ranking for related keywords, and ensuring that your site’s traffic is significantly boosted.
3. Analyze Shopper Behavior
Your own eCommerce store can be a treasure trove of useful information, with customer behavior revealing strengths and weaknesses in your sales funnel. When a user enters your site, shopper insight tools will begin to log their movements.
With this information comes detailed statistics about popular cross-sales, the amount of time spent on certain pages, and product interaction. By utilizing these data points, you’ll be able to identify growth opportunities for your business.
For example, let’s say that your customer insights tool displays that a particular page of your site has a higher than normal bounce rate. From there, you’ll be able to edit the copy on that page, running A/B testing to objectively discover which combinations entice customers more.
Over time, by repeating this process, you’ll be able to refine your site, smoothing out your sales funnel and making sure customers reach the check-out screen. Simply by analyzing the data that shopper insight tools produce, you’ll be able to boost your conversion rate, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure your business is making the most of business Intelligence.
Your customers are your biggest asset, the data signals they produce can actively show you how to improve your eCommerce store.
Final Thoughts on the Power of Shopper Insights
Data and data analysis have embedded themselves in every industry, from finance to healthcare. Within the eCommerce sector, this is equally true, with customer data insights allowing marketing managers to boost the success of their sites.
By unlocking the power of data, you’re receiving a 360-degree view of the eCommerce sector, looking at trends, competitor data, and your own data in order to understand the industry you’re selling in as much as possible. By acting upon this data, making small changes to your site that are demonstrated to benefit customers, you’ll be able to completely optimize your sales process.
Embrace data on your eCommerce store and see just how far you can go.
