Creating marketing and sales strategies can be a guessing game. If your tactics result in better sales, you are bound to assume that your strategy is working. If not, you will continue to tweak your plans until you hit the target you are aspiring to.

But why play “try-and-test” tactics when analytics can take the guessing out of this game? Technology has resulted in the creation of various tools and apps that track the vast amount of data that your customers and prospects create. Your business can utilize this data to design specific sales and marketing strategies that improve the bottom line and maximizes ROI.

Here are five ways in which ecommerce analytics can improve the bottom line of a business.

1. Improve new sales

Knowing your prospect is important. The acquisition of a new customer is never easy. Analytics can help a business decide which segments of prospects to focus their attention on in order to generate new sales by answering questions including:

• Which prospects are easier to close than others?
• Who should you engage with in order to maximize your ROI?
• Which leads are more likely to convert to opportunities and deal closures?
• Pieces of content results in the lowest cost per acquisition?
• Channels do new prospects engage with the most?
• How should the web experience be designed for someone making a purchase for the first time versus someone who has purchased before?
• Which customers are likely to churn before the acquisition cost can be recovered?

2. Improve repeat sales

Retaining an existing customer is more desirable than acquiring a new one. With the aid of ecommerce analytics, you can gain valuable insights on which customers to focus on and answer questions like:

• When did a customer last make a purchase and how often does he/she buy something?
• Which customers will get you the maximum amount of profit?
• What customer behavior results in cross-selling and up-selling opportunities?
• Which products/services resulting in greater footfalls or in more recommendations to your brands?
• Why are some customers easier to service while others are more challenging?
• What are your existing customers saying about the business on social media?

3. Increase average order value

Product bundling is one way of increasing the average order value. The other way is to improve customer satisfaction levels so that the same customer comes back and does business with you again. Analytics provides powerful insights into:

• Which products/services are of greater interest to the customers/prospects?
• What is the average order value for each channel e.g. online versus in-store
• What do you need to do in order to improve customer service, reduce churn levels and pique the interest of your customer to execute transactions of greater value?
• How can you increase the customer lifetime value?

4. Compelling story

Simply visualizing or interpreting data is not what will result in better numbers on the P&L statement. Reports and dashboards are good to look at but unless you can incorporate that knowledge into creating effective strategies, the insights will be of no value. Your business must know how the different KPIs being tracked are related to each other and how they influence each other. This will help you design powerful customer journeys that translate into greater conversions. You will understand your buyer’s persona, know what challenges they face at various stages, what arguments they come up with at the different stages of the purchase cycle and how you can counter those arguments and close a sale.

• Explore how and why customer behavior is changing
• Know how your brand compares in relation to your competitors
• Understand what kind of messages appeal to your audience
• Encourage critical thinking in your staff members when making business decisions

5. Standardization of processes and automation

Organizations have data residing in different documents, on different systems with different departments. This warehouse of data can be a gold mine in promoting the growth of the company and formulating future strategies. What’s more is that customers and prospects leave a lot of information in the public domain including social media, blogs, review sites and business listings.

[bctt tweet=”Analytics helps brings all information, scattered across the enterprise as well as on the Internet, into a single pool.” username=”UInsights”] With this centralization your business can:

• Automate the process of collecting, storing and archiving data
• Standardize processes related to the tracking of data
• Monitor the pipeline to know which are the faster moving leads versus which are stagnating
• Measure various metrics and analyze them in order to make better and faster decisions.

Conclusion

Sifting through the data residing in your organization is not an easy task. In order to reap the benefits of analytics and improve the bottom line, it is necessary that your business works with quality data. This data needs to be accurate and consistent. Once you have the relevant data, ask meaningful questions and crunch the data to find the answers. Utilize the information in the end to build more comprehensive and targeted sales and marketing strategies that resonate directly to the customers’ subconscious desires and ambitions.

Once you know what motivates your customers, what their passions are, what they will pay a premium for and what they strive for in the personal or professional lives, you will be able to tailor your campaigns and business strategies in a way that results in direct improvement to the profitability figures and stay well ahead of your competition.

If you would like to discover how analytics could boost the bottom line of your business, talk to the Analytics Expert at ComTec. Find out where to start and get access to analytics capabilities. Email us on rpa@comtecinfo.com