Data analytics is one of the biggest technological innovations and advancements today. In the digital era that we are currently living in where everyone and everything is becoming increasingly connected, there is more data being generated, gathered, collected, and transferred than ever before. And for businesses of any size, making use of these massive amounts of data is absolutely essential for the success of a company, especially online-first businesses such as eCommerce. Data analytics has become an essential component of running a successful commerce business. And it’s not just useful for huge corporations that collect large amounts of data every day, but also for the smaller businesses too.

eCommerce as an industry has benefitted massively from data collection and analytics, with data now offering insights that the eCommerce store owners of the past could only dream of. By analyzing their data, eCommerce businesses can enjoy a range of benefits including better sales, improved business growth, and better customer relationships. Here are just some of the reasons why data analytics is so important in eCommerce, and how to put this process into practice.

Take Quicker Action

Using data analytics, businesses can now take much faster action in a range of different situations. Before such large amounts of data were being collected on businesses and customers, situations, where a business would only be able to take action after the fact, were not uncommon. For example, in the past, a business might have had to wait until a new product or service had already been launched in order to get a better understanding of how well it was doing in the market. Only after the launch would they be able to determine if the product was doing as well as expected and if any changes were needed to improve the results. It often involved an approach that was heavy on trial-and-error with no guarantee that the business would benefit in the end.

Today, however, data analysis tools have made it much easier for businesses to measure these things. Companies can collect real-time information during the process of getting a product or service ready to be launched, making it easier for them to more accurately predict the outcome and make decisions based on the data. This online master’s in marketing and data analytics in Boston from Emerson University is a great place to start learning more about how businesses can drive better decisions with data analytics.

Reduce the Risk of Errors

Data analytics can help eCommerce companies reduce the risk of errors by providing more context and clearer answers to any questions related to the business. Whether you want to know more about your business itself, your customers, the performance of your website, or the performance of your digital marketing campaigns, data analysis can be used to get a clearer idea of what is going on in any department or aspect. As a result, this can help to significantly reduce the guesswork when it comes to making key decisions for your eCommerce business and help you get it right with a more informed decision the first time around. You can use data analysis tools to find out more about inconsistencies and errors that you may not have been aware of, enabling you to correct these issues faster and make it easier to steer your business in the right direction before larger problems arise.

Learn More About Your Audience

Getting more deeper insights into their target audiences is one of the main ways that eCommerce businesses today have benefitted from data analytics tools. By analyzing the data that is available to you on your customers, you can find out more about consumer behavior, trends and preferences and use this information to your advantage in various aspects including marketing, website design, products, and customer services. By analyzing data to find out more about your target audience, you can build better relationships with your customers and boost your likelihood of getting loyal, repeat customers by improving the customer experience from start to finish. For example, you can use visitor data from your website to find out more about the products that individual customers have been browsing or purchasing, allowing you to personalize their experience and show that you’ve noticed them by suggesting relevant products to them on their next visit.

Save Money

Any business owner that has invested a lot of money into something that eventually flopped will tell you how heart-wrenching this situation it can be. While no business is without its fair share of mistakes and times where people have messed up, data analytics can help by providing further peace of mind when it comes to making sure that you know you are spending your money wisely. Whether you’re investing in a new product to sell on your eCommerce website or want to overhaul the website design, using data to get more information and details will help you figure out whether or not the results are likely to turn out the way that you’d hoped they would. And, you can use data to figure out how you are going to facilitate the changes, rather than simply making decisions and hoping for the best.

Save Time

For eCommerce business owners, any time that can be freed up to focus on improving the growth and success of your company is valuable. eCommerce is a business model where there are several different factors that will need to be taken into consideration, no matter the size of the business or the products that it sells. Trying to juggle lots of tasks at once can be tiring for any eCommerce business owner and can take your attention away from the things that are the most important. By using data analysis tools and features, you can save a lot of time by getting many of the answers to your most important questions much faster and gaining insights that you can base your decisions on in a range of different areas.

Improve Marketing Strategies

One of the main areas of eCommerce where data analytics can be put to use to get better results from your efforts is digital marketing. By collecting and analyzing your marketing data, it will become much easier for you to determine what works well when it comes to attracting new customers to your brand and what doesn’t generate a lot of interest, or even worse, is actively driving potential new customers away. Marketing analytics can be used in a wide range of digital marketing areas to find out more about what your target audience and existing customers respond to best. For example, you can analyze your social media marketing campaigns to learn more about the type of ad content that is most likely to be engaged with on social media and followed through, or use analysis of pay per click marketing to determine the types of ads that catch the attention of the right audience in search engine results.

Boost Customer Satisfaction

Using data to get to know your customers better doesn’t simply encourage them to return to your brand. It can also help your marketing efforts by actively improving the relationship that you have with your customers and encouraging them to let others know about your eCommerce store through word-of-mouth marketing. Analyzing customer data will help you learn more about both individuals and groups of customers, ultimately making it easier for you to tailor their customer experience with service strategies that you know are going to work well for them along with rewards, promotions, deals, and marketing content that they are going to respond well to.

How to Turn Data into Actionable Insights

To get the best results from data analytics in your eCommerce business, there are some general guidelines to follow. Keep the below in mind when you start with data analytics to help you get the best results.

Make Sure You’re Measuring the Right Metrics

When something is not measured, it cannot be optimized. eCommerce business owners will often have a lot of questions that they can get answers to and put to use in improving the business overall with the right data insights. Consider using data to get answers to questions such as why people are leaving your website, which devices customers are using when making a purchase, the channels that your customers are accessing your website from and which drive the most conversions, and which of your landing pages have the best rates of performance.

Segment Your Audience

Gathering and analyzing data on your target audience is the best way to find out more about them and make better future decisions in the future when it comes to marketing to, engaging with, and building better relationships with them. To get the best results from doing this, using segmentation is often essential. This is a process that involves grouping your audience into different segments based on the different attributes that they have in common. For example, you could segment your audience based on basic demographics, the devices that they use, whether they have purchased from your store before, and the devices that they use to visit your website.

Establish Context

Having a solid understanding of the context that the data appears will help you use data to make better decisions for your eCommerce business. It is important to first make sure that the context is established for any data that you are analyzing before using it to back business decisions. Understanding how the data has been collected, what the numbers mean, and how important they actually are when it comes to affecting your business will help you ensure that the data you are using is meaningful.

Integrate Data Sources

Typically, integrating your sources of data will lead to making faster, more effective decisions for your eCommerce business. It may be worth considering integrating big data solutions with more traditional databases. Doing this will make it easier for you to mine and connect all of your sources, providing a more in-depth and enhanced understanding and better insights into your business and customers.

Present Data with Clear Visualizations

You will often need to present the results of your data analysis to get the message across to employees, board members, shareholders, investors, and others. Clear visualizations such as infographics, flow charts, pie charts, graphs, and data stories are usually much easier to take in and remember compared to presentations that only contain words and numbers. These types of visualizations have been proven to promote cognitive action and can be useful whether you are storing your data in a way that you will need to be able to easily make sense of or when presenting it to others to help them understand it better.

Hire the Right Teams

While businesses today have access to a wide range of tools that are designed to help them get the best results from the collection and analysis of data, people who understand data analysis and your business will always be the best asset for building better business insights. When making hiring decisions, it’s important to keep this in mind. In addition, you may also be interested in providing your workforce with data analytics training. Data analytics professionals have the skills and knowledge required to not only find data that you can use in your business but also translate it into stories and insights that can be used to make the best decisions for growth, sales, brand awareness, and improving relationships with your customers.

Data analysis has become an essential factor for every business today. In the world of eCommerce, there is often a lot more data to analyze, making it crucial for success with this type of business. Whatever products you are selling online, putting data collection and analysis to good use will enable you to save money and time while improving customer relationships with a better customer experience overall, getting to know your target audience, and taking faster action to correct errors and mistakes in your company while improving the results that you get from marketing strategies.