E-commerce is one of the fastest growing segments of retail in the world. In 2021, 1 billion customers spent more than 4 trillion online. If you are in the e-commerce space, you must compete with some of the largest retailers in history, Amazon, Alibaba, and Wal-mart, to even show up on search engine rankings. Beyond that, you will need to stand out from the tens of millions of other e-commerce sites.
Capturing digital data from your marketing and sales efforts will give you valuable insights into your consumer base. Through thoughtful analyses, you can turn these immense data troves into decisions that increase sales and attract more business.
Assess webpage effectiveness
While all modern businesses must maintain and track their website performance, these metrics are especially crucial for e-commerce companies that both market and sell their products online.
Website analytics offer important insights into how your customers are interacting with your webshop, and if they are encountering any obstacles that are influencing their buying decisions.
Common e-commerce KPIs for website analytics include bounce rates, conversions, and returning traffic.
Bounce rates measure the percentage of visitors that exit your webpage without taking a single action, such as clicking through to a new link or subscribing to your email list. High bounce rates can be problematic for e-commerce sites that require customers to navigate past the first page to make a purchase. Keeping the bounce rate below the industry average of 20 to 40 percent is ideal.
Depending on the cause of the bounce, it can be addressed by improving user site experience, describing the webpage’s content more accurately in the meta description, or inserting attention grabbing content like embedded videos.
When a user follows through on the suggested call-to-action, it is calculated in a webpage’s conversion rate. This could be signing up for a webinar or newsletter, or making a purchase. The average e-commerce site conversion rate is just below 3%. Some of the best ways to boost a low conversion rate is by ensuring that your products are being presented to the right customers.
Identify target consumers
If you’re not sure who your ideal customers are, digital marketing data can help you with that. For example, you can install a pop-up to ask customers why they visited your shop. This will give you quantitative data behind your customers’ motivations and needs.
Digital marketing analytics from Google and social media sites like Facebook and Instagram can give the granular demographic data of the people who tend to browse your site. For example, after running an analysis, you may learn that the majority of your customers are people over 45. This data point can help you further refine your marketing and attract more of that demographic.
Select in-demand product categories
Knowing who visits your website and problems they are trying to solve can improve your product selection strategy. Prior to launching a digital marketing campaign, you should do some thorough market research and competitor analysis to uncover which items are in-demand but underrepresented.
You can also gather this data from your shop by analyzing the contents of your customer’s abandoned carts, wish lists, favourites, and other website features.
Embedding high-ranking SEO keywords into your digital marketing efforts will make your e-commerce site easier to find.
Leverage location-specific data
Although e-commerce retailers can advertise to customers worldwide, the ability to tweak products and marketing efforts based on a browser’s location can translate into higher sales.
For example, an e-commerce clothing site can use geo-targeting to alter the product advertising that first appears to customers. Users with IP addresses from warmer climates may see ads for swimwear and sunglasses, while visitors from colder regions will receive promotions for outerwear.
You can also leverage geo-targeting data to identify customer interests. For example, customers that frequently check into hotels or airports may be marked as frequent travelers. Thus, ads targeted to this customer segment should focus on a product’s portability, or usefulness on the road.
Gain insight into a new market
Most e-commerce companies start off in a niche market. Remember the days when Amazon was an online bookstore? However, as the company perfected its customer acquisition and delivery processes, it was able to expand into broader and broader markets.
Similarly, you can use the data generated by your e-commerce shop to test out adjacent markets. For example, you can analyze your social media marketing efforts to see if customers frequently mention items they would like to order from your store.
You may also notice that your shop is gaining interest from users in other countries. In either case, you can analyze the viability of expanding your product offerings or delivery range by comparing the prices, payment offers, and selection offered by competing shops.