If you are reading this, chances are you are interested in knowing more about how to best leverage analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) to boost your e-commerce sales. In order to design the best strategy suited to your needs, it is worth taking the time to see how these powerful tools work.
Although they fall under the same umbrella of data analytics and share a few common features, e-commerce analytics and BI also show some differences in their functions and applications. In a nutshell, while e-commerce analytics is more useful in the identification of the reasons behind a trend or pattern, BI relies on past tendencies and the cause-effect processes that brought a given company to where it is today.
Let’s take a closer look.
What Is E-commerce Analytics?
E-commerce analytics consists of collecting all the relevant data concerning your online store. Staying on top of these fluctuations can help you gain insight into your customer base, their shopping habits, and growing trends. The data accumulated throughout the full customer journey – from discovery and acquisition to conversion and retention – will help your business make educated decisions about what’s working and what needs to be improved.
What Is E-commerce BI?
Whilst equally data-driven, the term Business Intelligence refers to the act of collecting information about competitors, internal business operations as well as customers that can be leveraged by a company. E-commerce businesses can extract highly valuable and actionable insight from BI. This method can in fact not only test the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, but also check product performance, customer engagement, and help set the right timing for business operations. Moreover, BI can disclose important elements concerning the target audience such as its fragmentation, in turn helping with personalization.
Now that we have shed a light on the different functions carried out by the two main data & analytics methods, let’s take a look at how they can help you grow your e-commerce business.
Top-3 Benefits of Using E-commerce Analytics
E-commerce analytics gives you unique insight into your prospective and current client base. Knowing exactly what to look for and how to leverage it can make or break your business.
Below, we have outlined three ways you can incorporate the data collected into your business strategy:
1. Boosts Personalization
Personalization is there to support buyers at every step of their customer journey. Along with providing a user-friendly, intuitive experience tailored to each individual prospect, a personalized journey will help your customers feel seen as people and not just another number.
In practical terms, personalization boils down to a few key points:
- targeted advertisement based on the audience fragment
- customized e-mails addressing customers by their name
- discounts and special offers based on customers’ individual taste and circumstances (e.g. birthdays; Valentine’s Day, etc.)
2. Gives Insight into the Buyer Experience
Browsing activity data can give you all the information you need to provide your audience with products and services that are relevant to them. Tracking your buyer’s activity will let you know how their interact with a specific brand and shine a light on their past purchases, ads viewed, and uncomplete purchases. It will also give you a sense of which products get the most interest at a particular time of the year.
3. Improves Customer Service
Since we have all been on the receiving hand of poor customer service at one point or another, it is easy to relate to the pain experienced by clients and prospects dealing with subpar levels of both online and phone support.
Naturally, an experience of this kind is unlikely to lead to a purchase or subscription. Conversely, state-of-the-art customer-centric service can not only give your prospect the final, gentle push they need to seal the deal, but can do wonders for customer loyalty and retention – in turn positively impacting your ROI.
Analytics-driven customer support will generally look like this:
- monitoring relevant data to shed a light on delivery process issues (delays, logistic fails, etc.)
- collecting customer feedback by handing out surveys
- tracking customer support’s responsiveness to design a better strategy for prompt and seamless communication
Top-3 Benefits of Using E-commerce Business Intelligence
Leveraging Business Intelligence is every bit as useful as working with e-commerce analytics – even better, the two tools complement each other.
Below, we have highlighted the top-3 ways BI can help your e-commerce business:
1. Strengthens Supply Chain
In a time where audiences interact with the internet several times a day, people tend to be impatient. The challenges of modern living have brought consumers to opt for products that can be ordered and delivered at the click of a button. For this reason, maintaining impeccable standards of supply chain is paramount to the success of your e-commerce business.
BI will provide you with important information regarding the inventory status of a specific item so that your buyers can enjoy a seamless and fast delivery. Failure to do so leads to unhappy customers and decreasing rates of loyalty and conversion. Business Intelligence will also help you keep track of how fast an item is selling, in turn helping you avoid unnecessary inventory costs.
2. Secures Payment Process
The data collected by BI tools in relation to payment plays a vital role in the detection of fraud. Thanks to the streamlined reporting of different pieces of information concerning a potential buyer, picking up on suspicious activity before it is too late becomes much easier.
The ability to promptly pinpoint fraudulent activity can help organizations know exactly what transaction or account is to blame – in turn preventing the same scenario from happening again in the future.
3. Keeps You Future-ready
E-commerce merchants can leverage BI to gain insight into future trends by tracking the more and the less successful product categories, the fluctuations in popularity related to season, and even the size of transactions.
Tuning in with current trends will give you the ability to take proactive measures regarding what product is likely to experience high demand in the coming weeks or months. This allows you to time a clearance sale for items that are becoming harder to sell.
Where Do I Find the Data on my E-commerce Platform?
Now that we have taken a deep dive into the ins and outs of e-commerce analytics and Business Intelligence, you might be looking for hands-on approaches to pulling relevant data out of your e-commerce platform and incorporating it into your business strategy.
Whilst some of these operations are done manually, the best option is always to rely on the expertise of data analysts. This will not only bring you high-quality results, it will also free up your brainwork and creativity to focus on what matters the most: your e-commerce business.
At Razzo, we specialize in working with small to medium-sized Magento shops. With our help, you will be able to visualize easily-digestible metrics and data to give you a clear view of where your business is at. You will also be able to highlight possible areas of improvement.
Simply connect Razzo through the Magento 2 REST API to allow Razzo to capture and process all relevant data to be converted into user-friendly graphics.
How to Get Started with E-commerce Analytics and Business Intelligence
You have given it some thought and decided e-commerce analytics and Business Intelligence can help your business thrive. Nonetheless, you might be wondering where to start.
Whether you are leading an e-commerce startup or want to incorporate data and analytics into your existing business, you will first and foremost lay out a sound data-driven financial management strategy. This can be easily achieved, especially when dealing with apps with a great analytics dashboard (such as Magento). Lastly, let the early data you have collected and analyzed inform your next business decision.
And of course, do not hesitate to rely on specifically designed tools such as Razzo to give you an on-point and actionable insight into your strengths and areas of improvement.
How to get started with e-commerce analytics using Razzo.
If you have admin access to your Ecommerce, like Magento, you can set up Razzo in under 3 minuts. First you create a 30-day free trial on Razzo here. After you account is created, you will be redirected to your Razzo account, where there will be a onboarding tour that will help you add your first connection.
If you dont know how to find an Access Token for your Magento Rest API, please send this guide to your developer or ecommerce manager.
When you have completed the onboarding tour, you are ready and all set up to be taken control of your Ecommerce data.