With the e-commerce landscape becoming more competitive, industry players have no choice but to go the extra mile and fine-tune their customer experience. If you are in the e-commerce business, the growing competition means you have no time to waste.
There are many ways to gain a competitive advantage in a tight market, but when it comes to e-commerce, the best way to go is the data-driven route. Fortunately, e-commerce sites have a lot of data points to leverage, and these tips and tricks will help you get started with leveraging data.
Start with a Buyer Persona
The first thing you want to understand is the persona of your buyer. While it is not always possible to have a single accurate persona representing an entire market segment, not having a good understanding of your buyers is an even bigger mistake.
Creating a buyer persona requires you to tap into data points beyond the e-commerce site itself. You can review the average audience demography of your social media profile, review industry standards, and tap into other sources of information to gain clarity.
Some of the factors you want to take into account when creating a buyer persona are:
- Average age
- Gender
- Shopping behavior
- Engaged channels
- Demographics
- Spending habits (beyond shopping)
- Ads and content consumption
This data can be acquired through various sources. Upon collecting the data, you can then turn to methods like big data analysis or artificial intelligence to help better understand insights about your customers. That’s how you will end up with an accurate buyer persona to work with.
Data Centralization is Key
The next challenge you want to tackle is data centralization. As made apparent in the previous section of this article, there are countless data points and sets to tap into if you really want to know your customers. The real challenge is unifying different data points to get a holistic, bird’s-eye view.
Once again, the right technology can help you centralize your data for better processing and analysis. Top-rated e-commerce platforms have analytics tools and APIs that make centralizing data analysis easy. You also have services like Zapier making data synchronization easier.
A centralized data warehouse built from scratch is not necessarily the solution, especially since there are tools that can help you create unified and highly efficient data lakes without hassle. Look into services like Amazon Athena to get started.
Beyond Analysis
Initial data crunching and analysis are tasks that can be fully automated. Thanks to pre-built AI models, you can immediately collect insights from vast amounts of data coming from multiple sources. The initial setup may seem complex but getting the data analysis routine running is actually very easy.
The real challenge is deriving value from the insights. That’s where actually reading the data, understanding context, and making decisions based on the generated insights matters. It takes deep analytical skills to make the most out of the data we have available right now.
Do it right, however, and you will gain a massive competitive advantage. The more you can understand your customers, the more you can customize your CX for them, and the further ahead you will be from your competitors.