The customer data platform market is steadily rising from USD 2.4 billion in 2020 to USD 10.3 billion in 2025. Parallelly, businesses focusing on customer experience enjoy an 80% revenue spike. Do you see the connection?
E-commerce companies and brands confront a number of obstacles, one of which is coming up with new products, as not all of them will find favor with customers even if they seem promising on paper. Inadequate market research and poor product positioning may have contributed to this failure. A free SEO audit assists an online store to analyze where it is lacking as it is checked against 60+ factors.
Ergo, let’s learn why one should collect customer data and how it is critical to the success of eCommerce sites?
It is important to note that one sector that has expanded rapidly over the past several years is online retailing, as consumers have embraced the convenience of being able to research a great number of options before making a purchase. In order to succeed, eCommerce SEO services must deal with “Consumer data,” the term used to describe the massive volumes of data from which crucial information and insights can be gleaned for running the company.
What do you mean by customer data?
Customer data is all the information of customers, collected and stored by businesses (Personal, behavioral, and demographic data).
What are the 4 types of customer data?
The 4 types of customer data are
Basic data: Customer’s name, contact details (email address, phone number), age, job title, and demographic data, such as gender, and income, which are a few examples of basic customer data.
Interaction data: Interaction data are the details of the customer touchpoints like the buyer journey including page views, downloads, subscriptions, social shares, demo requests, email inquiries, and more.
Behavioral data: Behavioral data is the customer’s experience with the product or service. For example, free trial sign-ups, logins, deactivations, feature utilization, downgrades, and user license additions.
Attitudinal data: Attitudinal data is the customers’ opinion about your product or service. Eg: Online reviews, comments, ratings, and satisfaction surveys.
What type of data does eCommerce use?
eCommerce businesses use all types of customer data available to make appropriate business moves. All of them are particularly beneficial in helping brands stay competitive. They help eCommerce businesses identify challenges, find new opportunities and refine existing strategies.
Why collect customer data?
Collecting customer data in eCommerce allows a company to enhance a customer’s shopping experience, making the customer more satisfied and increasing the company’s revenue. In short, it benefits both the business and the consumer.
Benefits
The benefits of collecting customer information are vast. One benefit of having this data is that it allows businesses to give shoppers a more personalized shopping experience by understanding their likes and dislikes. In addition, businesses can learn from their past mistakes from customer data and make their business better for future customers.
Drawbacks
There are some drawbacks when it comes to collecting customer data. For one, consumers have a fear of releasing any information about themselves to businesses. This can make it difficult to collect customer data in some cases. In addition, eCommerce sites must be able to handle this information appropriately and assure consumers that their information is secure.
How do eCommerce businesses collect customer data?
There are many different ways in which your online store can collect customer data. But, it is important that eCommerce businesses responsibly collect customer data. Here are some ways in which to obtain customer information:
Offer incentives: A business may offer a discount to consumers who share their information.
Explain the benefits: Ask the consumer to take a survey to receive more personalized recommendations. The consumer is more likely to take the survey because they know it will benefit them.
Give them the power to opt-out: Many businesses allow users to opt out of email subscriptions and give them control over their information so that users will feel more comfortable sharing it.
How does the eCommerce industry use customer data?
Customer data opens up new opportunities for eCommerce businesses. It is used by eCommerce stores to make better decisions in increasing revenue, offer more efficient customer support responses, and conduct targeted promotions and marketing campaigns.
Analyzing customer data helps in predicting trends or the next best-selling product.
Customer Data in eCommerce helps businesses come up with innovative pricing strategies for every product rather than simply relying on competitors’ prices.
Most importantly analyzing customer data helps in forecasting product demands. With historical data one can make accurate demand forecasts, eliminating the risk of overstocking or understocking.
eCommerce brands can accelerate conversions by offering better personalization experiences based on customer data collected.
Analyzing customer data or big data allows eCommerce businesses to optimize their customer service and offer enhanced shopping experiences leading to better customer satisfaction and retention.
Ultimately, eCommerce businesses collect customer data and use them to generate more sales. Analyzing customer data gets almost all answers for all eCommerce business problems.
What about website analytics?
Monitoring the traffic of your eCommerce website is something that every successful website does so that they can see how well their site is performing. This means that eCommerce business owners should be noting how many visitors their website is getting, how long they are staying on the site, and where exactly they are losing business.
Basic Web Analytics
Most websites come with their basic analytics software that will give you some important information. For example, the following information can be analyzed to see how well a website is performing:
Bounce rate: The amount of visitors to your website who leave the site after viewing only one page.
Absolute unique visitors: The amount of visitors to your page that has never been visited before. This is based on their IP address to differentiate between returning visitors.
Direct traffic: Those who visited your website by typing in your website’s name into the web browser.
Referring sites: This refers to other websites that are linking to your website. The visitors are clicking on the link from the other website and it takes them to your website.
Search engines: The visitors that found your website from search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
Keywords: Particular words or phrases that describe the content of your page and which also help search engines match pages with searches.
Pages: This tells you the amount of page views that your website has for every webpage.
How Customer Data can help in improving the strategy? – Big Data For eCommerce
In the last two years, this is a term that has become synonymous with eCommerce analytics. It entails sifting through massive amounts of data (Think hundreds of terabytes) to reach a scientific, statistic-based solution to a problem. It’s a burgeoning field, with a continuously growing scope. Big data can be invaluable for eCommerce business owners, for a variety of reasons:
1. Behavioral Targeting:
This remains the single most important factor upon which the success or failure of your eCommerce business rests. Big Data helps you understand your customers better – The products they like, why they leave their carts without paying, the times of the day and the months of the year that see the most customers, and a variety of other salient business decisions. You can plan your marketing campaigns around this – A practice is known as behavioral targeting, or behavioral marketing – to maximize conversions. Examples include sending personalized emails with discount coupons to customers on their birthdays, targeted pop-ups informing customers of seasonal offers, and so on.
Big data and behavioral targeting tools are gaining popularity – And we’ve got one ourselves. Our new SaaS personalization tool, Targetbay, offers comprehensive personalization and in-depth analytics that you can use to target customers based on their on-site behavior, demographics, and a variety of other metrics.
Customers like to see discounts and recommended products, and most importantly, they love a personal touch. This is impossible without data: What they tend to buy, how much time they spend browsing through products, how much they spend per transaction, how often they visit eCommerce sites, how often they abandon their cart, and myriad other bits of information.
3. Customer Satisfaction:
It’s been found that close to 68% of visitors tend to leave websites because they aren’t happy with the customer service being offered. Using Big Data, you can coordinate and synchronize multiple communication channels –Emails, phone calls, and live chat, if applicable. Big Data is crucial to understanding recurring issues and fixing them immediately.
4. Dynamic Pricing:
With enough data, customers can be gauged for their spending patterns and on-site behavior. Once personas are attributed to customers, prices can be varied to entice them back to the site, where they to leave. Dynamic discounts are a powerful tool but are only successful when executed with enough data. This has been one of the most effective customer retention strategies to date.
5. End-To-End Analytics
You can use Big Data to understand not just your customers, but how your entire business is doing: Stocking, shipping, inventory, and sales. This gives you the sort of bird’s eye view that you can use to forecast future cash flows, Gross Merchandise Volumes, customer acquisition rates, and other parameters crucial to the success of eCommerce businesses.
Customer Data in eCommerce Matters
Web analytics software has the potential to boost a company’s bottom line and provide a more satisfying interaction with customers. All e-commerce platforms need to track user behavior and analyze web analytics to stay competitive. After employing these methods a handy free SEO audit can help you quantify the impact of your efforts on all your eCommerce SEO services.
Understanding customer data helps you streamline marketing efforts and drive better revenue outcomes. To assess whether your eCommerce site is “marketing ready”, here is our exclusive All-in-one Audit.
