The online market is a continuously evolving space with new technologies, changing marketing tactics, and growing popularity. In order for businesses to survive through these fast-paced evolutions, they must be adept to take faster decisions and that’s when analytics come into action. Imagine you gauge what your customers are purchasing and what pricing can bag to the maximum profits.
Assume that you get insights into your store well in advance to understand the issues even before the customers point it out to the customer support team. As an online seller, not only would these data help your business grow, but also help you draft your marketing strategies, determine the best-selling products, and deploy sales promotions. In a nutshell, analytics help you fill the gaps and solve the issues that exist in your ecommerce business while helping you make better-informed business decisions.
What is Analytics?
Analytics refers to a group of data points that point out what customers are interacting with, how they are doing it, and for how long are they communicating with the online website/ site. Defining these data can help in understanding what’s happening on your different web pages. In simplified words, Analytics is the study of online behavior to improve it.
How is Analytics beneficial for a regular Ecommerce Website?
Let’s begin with an example; Imagine you wish to sell your brand’s footwear. What do you consider the best way to boost sales and grow your business? We would say, it would be by the successful implementation of analytics solutions. Below are a few benefits every ecommerce website – regular as well as upgraded versions, can enjoy with a successful implementation of analytics:
Figure out what strategy works for you
If you are a regular ecommerce business owner, your resources may be finite and that makes both time and burn rate the decisive success factors. Without understanding what marketing factors are working well for your business, you will be simply wasting your time as well as money. Also, you’ll be missing out on the possible profits you could have earned with the right marketing strategies. Hence, analytics is the right tool that can help you measure what strategies are bringing you customers as well as profits and what is not; by which you can cease the ones that don’t work and focus on the ones that can even double up your revenue.
Build a powerful supply chain
The importance of online shopping is increasing every day and the reasons are two – convenience and flexible pricing. These are the same reasons why your supply chain needs to be powerful. Make sure that the products you advertise on your website are available in sufficient quantities in your inventory. If this step is forsaken, the result will be slower delivery and hence, compromised customer satisfaction as well as customer Lifetime Value or LTV. On the other hand, overflowing your stocks with units not only eats up your space but also increases your operational costs. Therefore, marking a balance between the two – supply and demand could be challenging. That’s when using analytics to predict future sales can be of great help.
Personalize Recommendations
Did you know that selling to the already existing customers brings more revenue than attempting to acquire new customers? Due to this reason, when you are attempting to sell your products to a customer more than once, you are optimizing that customer’s value and personalized recommendations can do the job for you. Every time an online shopper clicks on a product and sees other products in the recommendations, there is a high possibility for them wanting to explore the products and purchase some additional products along with their original purchase. Analytics can help you know everything that a customer who once visited your store likes, including their shopping interests, likes, and dislikes. Using such data, you can showcase relevant product recommendations to your customers when they return to your website the next time.
Personalize Shopping Experience
Different online shoppers engage with varied ecommerce websites in multiple ways. Some shoppers might love to keep checking the ‘deal of the day’, while some shoppers might straight go to the category of products they wish to explore. Since the type of customers visiting the ecommerce websites have unique tastes for online shopping, it could be difficult for store owners to deliver a personalized shopping experience. Analytics can benefit a regular ecommerce website by helping them study the varying customer behaviors and defining how the website must be structured and designed based on their preferences. Generally, the product landing pages are what grab the customer’s attention; and that’s where ecommerce websites can deliver personalized shopping experiences using analytics. When ecommerce websites provide personalized shopping experiences to every online shopper, they are most likely to keep their customers engaged and can potentially convince and motivate them to complete a purchase with the website. Also, with personalized shopping experiences come customer loyalty and brand recognition.
Track all possible things
In ecommerce, web traffic can be branched into four categories, viz. search, referral, direct, and campaign traffic. The search traffic refers to the traffic that comes from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The referral traffic implies to the traffic that comes from a reference on other websites. Direct traffic can refer to the traffic that has come from an unknown source. The campaign traffic implies to the traffic that has been identified by the marketer. Depending on the analytics tool you use, you can track every action in your ecommerce website with analytics and that eventually will be useful in driving more traffic to your website.
Identify Fraud
As analytics are capable of detecting patterns in customer behavior, it holds great importance in identifying frauds. Analytics can potentially warn you when any fraudulent transaction is detected. Being an ecommerce website owner, you can assure the identity of the customers by sending out notifications to ask if it is them who initiated the transaction. Only upon receiving approval from the customer, the transaction must be processed. Since analytics can smartly detect fraudulent activities, it is a must for regular ecommerce websites to employ it for safe and secure business transactions.
Evaluate your marketing
Online marketing analytics is crucial to every ecommerce business. You may spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on online marketing campaigns, but, if you are not able to understand its efficiency, you may never be able to evaluate whether your marketing strategy is working or not. Analytics, here, takes charge of this and evaluates the advertisement clicks, visitors’ engagement time on the website, and effectiveness of the channel data & promotions. Once you evaluate these analytics metrics, your regular ecommerce website can benefit from determining your Return On Investment or ROI and calibrating your future marketing strategies accordingly.
Determine Trends
Analytics for ecommerce is highly beneficial for determining future trends. These predictions are made with reference to a few factors such as the season, the number of transactions, the product categories, etc. It helps businesses learn what their future sales will look like and what products must be taken into the limelight. Be it rearrangement of inventory, be it regulation of the marketing strategy, businesses can take an informed and strategic plan of action to execute sales for the future that promises success, profits, conversion rates, as well as revenue. Moreover, based on the data shown in the analytics report, ecommerce businesses can determine the offers and discounts they can offer in the coming days to bag more sales using the right tactics.
The entryway to increased conversion rates
Getting the right and relevant statistical information is the primary step in laying the foundations of your online selling venture. Analytics help you test certain aspects as well as the overall layout of your regular ecommerce website to help you run a profitable business and boost your conversion rates. Keeping track of your store’s performance with analytics is not only the entryway to higher conversions but also the key to the overall success of the ecommerce website. After all, the lower the issues, the higher the customer experience, and so will be the conversion rates.
Conclusion
Owning an ecommerce business and not measuring it is like going into the oceans without a compass – there is no goal and nothing to guide you! In order to learn whether your strategy is the right one, you should measure the outcome of the same to find the possible mistakes (if any). If not, you’ll be spending your money without knowing whether you are earning any! If you are someone who is not into the technical stuff, your regular ecommerce website can also benefit from analytics with Builderfly. Not only does the platform lets you make online store without being a technical expert but also helps you monitor your store performance using analytics and performance boosters. The best part is that you can start your online selling journey with Builderfly for free, with its Starter Plan!
