Data-Powered Strategy to Drive Ecommerce Conversions in 2023

Data-Driven Marketing Has Become The Newest Hot Topic For eCommerce Conversions. As Such, For Many Online Retailers, This Powerful New Way of Marketing Can Be Daunting To Understand. Here Are The Steps To Implement A Data-Powered Strategy And The Various Benefits It Can Offer Your Brand!

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You’ve probably found yourself in this situation: you come across an ad which seems all too familiar. This highly effective ad feels like it was made just for you; it has content you are interested in, uncovers needs you didn’t know you had, and probably will lead you to click on it! In reality, that wasn’t a chance occurrence. That ad was actually specifically designed to come across you!

Most marketers know that tapping into data and insights drawn from their customers is key to improving, optimizing and securing more consumers into conversions for their business. What many don’t know, is that the marketing process doesn’t have to be blind guesswork leading to low-ROI results with high budget spend. By using data-driven marketing strategies, a business owner can quickly and effectively create compelling marketing campaigns which drive conversions into their marketing funnel while truly identifying their target audience and understanding where in the customer journey they lie. This helps brands to realize why certain audience segments may or may not commit to a purchase, and what specific details led to their decision. Below, we will explore the data-driven marketing approach to building successful eCommerce campaigns, the steps involved in implementing it, and the many benefits and opened doors it can lead to!

What Is Data-Driven Marketing, And How Can It Help My eCommerce Business?

Here’s a fun fact: did you know that 44% of marketers say that measuring their demand generation ROI is a top priority for them? Yet only 15% of marketers actually measure their campaigns’ success and the leads they generate. To stay ahead of the game, eCommerce brands must continuously update and track their data-driven marketing strategies.

So, what is data-driven marketing? This term explains the process by which digital marketers can tailor and tweak their campaigns towards certain user groups and prospects based on the hundreds of interactions within a customer journey, and then driving conversions by recycling the methods that worked. It’s about the information you collect from your customer or target audience paired with current market trends—basically, data. This process allows brands to learn about their target demographics and hit their marketing return goals while maximizing sales and minimizing ad spend in a prediction-oriented approach. It’s a crucial marketing element, since 50% of customers won’t read or engage with content if it’s not relevant to them. Remember—customer behaviors shift over time based on factors such as the products they buy, new market competition and the process by which they shop. To remain competitive, marketers need to monitor audience behavior to adjust their strategy and allocate ad spend properly to retain higher value lifetime customers.

By powering your marketing efforts with data, one can drive conversions through models which track the performance of marketing initiatives, run tests to maximize efficiency, and leverage the data to attain sales optimization. For example: a clothing brand runs an ad about their newest product launch. If this ad were to be shown to all shoppers who might have show some level of interest in their product, it would be too vast a generalization to really capture an audience who is actually interested in purchasing the item(s). These customers are simply interested in a product category, rather than committing to this specific brand. This results in high marketing spend with low returns on investment. However, if the company utilizes data science, it can quickly identify the audience segments which have a higher probability of converting, and those customers who are more likely to return again. By targeting these high-intent customers the brand can grow and scale online without sacrificing its ROI.

Ecommerce Conversions — A Data-powered strategy to boost eCommerce conversions for online retailers

The Benefits and Factors to Consider In Data-Driven Marketing For eCommerce

Data-driven campaigns elevate digital marketing by identifying the right content which will catch users’ attention by establishing the right creative and tone to keep them engaged. Tracking customer behavior in all campaigns and monitoring performance will help measure the effectiveness of content and how well it will resonate with one group versus another. After that, this actionable data can be recycled to achieve scalable growth with new customers.

Here, we will take a look at the many opportunities that data-driven marketing can offer for your business, especially in regards to online profitability and growth.

1. Use conversion data and behavioral data to find new audiences with high intent:

When someone lands on your website, they bring with them hundreds of variables within their digital footprint. This data is impossible to manually parse through and analyze into effective models. Therefore, it’s best to use an application such as Google Analytics to store and make sense of this data. With such tools, a business owner can quickly analyze these variables and identify what piqued that specific customer’s interest. These insights allow you to truly understand why the customer interacted with your store, what factors would have the highest probability of converting, and what will cause them to engage more with your brand—or bounce off from the site. This is powerful information. It can help you improve your on-site experience, craft compelling messages in creatives which make sense to them and build campaigns that don’t generalize the message through guesswork. By understanding your customers’ needs, you can sell better products in a more efficient way and expect higher returns at all stages of your marketing funnel by introducing relevant products to the audiences which matter.

2. Understand your retargeted audiences:

It’s important to recognize that all your website visitors aren’t the same. They are each at different stages of the buyer journey and have unique needs they need fulfilled. Therefore, your marketing message to each of them needs to be tailored appropriately. This can mean the difference between one customer click that leads them to your brand, or a disinterested customer who bounces away. Realizing that certain retargeted audiences have a higher likelihood of converting is key to avoiding the spray-and-pray method of marketing. You should target audiences based on their intent to buy, needs, preferences and online behavior. This way, you don’t have to throw strategies at a wall, hoping they stick. Instead, you use time-tested, proven insights to build marketing campaigns which are designed to work—through the power of data.

3. Track high influence products and market trends:

Staying attuned to the current trends of your target market is a huge factor to consider in your overall marketing strategy. If you have a large catalog, you may miss products that have a high influence by ignoring their allotted marketing budget. Not all products are created equal, and some will be more popular than others. Don’t ignore this! By using data science, a brand can easily identify which offerings have higher organic influence and track their potential conversion rate versus the average conversion rate of other products being marketed. This can be used in tangent with creative and strategic messaging to attract new audiences or recapture customers who have fallen off.

4. Target loyal customers back into the funnel:

Every brand has its loyal customers and big spenders. With data-driven approaches, brands can identify who will be most likely to buy something within the next few days, weeks or months. As such, this can help marketing teams understand who is most likely to become a loyal customer—if engaged with correctly. For instance, say an online retail (ecommerce) company launches a marketing campaign to existing customers who are more likely to be early adopters. They can use data science to figure out who will purchase within the next 30 days, and then tailor their campaign to this specific loyal audience and drive conversions faster and more efficiently. This helps improve the brand’s bottom funnel marketing return and conversion rates while maximizing the average order value of these campaigns. Meaning, more sales, profits and less marketing spend!

5. Optimize existing ad campaigns:

No marketer likes to see a low click-through-rate (CTR). Without insights into what’s not working, though, many marketers will scrap their whole campaign and start again from scratch. This doesn’t need to happen! With data-driven marketing, one can understand the problems within the existing marketing efforts and make applicable changes. Customer lifetime value models can help eCommerce brands optimize their campaigns by modeling data. This can help inform marketing teams on where to increase or reduce bids and which ad segments to pause based on performance.

The Steps To Implementing A Data-Driven Approach For eCommerce Brands

Below are the steps to setting up an effective and efficient data-driven marketing strategy and the reasons why each factor is important in the overall marketing machine.

Set a goal – The first thing to do is to set goals for what your campaigns aim to accomplish. Do you want to pull in customers, build loyalty, drive sales/conversions, or something else? Establish your goals and focus on these aspects to ensure an effective comprehensive data-driven approach.

Collect the right data – After establishing goals, you need accurate customer data from an authentic source. Google Trends and Google Data are good options for data collection. This provides in-depth information but doesn’t keep the data fragmented. If the full view of the audience is neglected, critical details can be omitted from your strategy. Knowing where potential or existing customers go for information is key. Getting data on their age, gender, types of products they prefer, interests and timing of when they tend to buy is also important. One good option for attaining this data is to incorporate quick surveys at certain points in the customer journey. After collecting this data, centralize it in your CRM to elicit a complete analysis of customer behavior, which you can then track and study.

Segment your audience and build buyer personas – After collecting and centralizing your data, you can segment and develop buyer personas based on the information and determine what is most valuable to your company’s products and services. Not everyone who purchases your products behaves in the same way, nor do they have the same characteristics. Defining multiple audience groups within your target audience based on these criteria will help you serve content which aligns with their preferences and needs. This process is known as “segmentation”. After identifying these, you can divide your customer base in manners which are compelling and actionable.

Select the appropriate channels and timing – Segmenting your audience and constructing buyer personas will help you understand what your customers like and where they spend their time online. Certain people prefer brick-and-mortar stores, while other prefer perusing online. Some check social platforms more than emails, and others may use their smartphones more than their PCs. Knowing where your demographics hang out is crucial towards building effective marketing messages, particularly for eCommerce brands. Besides location of interaction, data shows that 80% of consumers prefer brands who know when to approach them. Identifying what time they buy and share products can help optimize your strategy. This will help ensure your messages don’t get ignored simply because of timing.

Build a great customer’s journey map – Simply forcing more incoming web traffic isn’t an effective method for generating conversions. In reality, this is good for firms who have already build a rapport with their audience and understand their behavior and needs. Rather, it’s important to concentrate on analyzing the sales funnel and the performance within these stages. Tracking specific aspects of this funnel can build a bigger picture of the strategy’s performance and associated issues. Whether it’s the thank you, landing, pre-landing or CTA, its necessary to know where and why the customer did what they did. Typically, the checkout is the most problematic area for eCommerce brands. By knowing what’s triggering targeted customers to bounce, you can figure out how to optimize your marketing structure. This will usually lead to an instant boost in conversion rates and higher retainment of customers.

Learn from your loyal customers and performance – A robust data-driven strategy needs to have a high customer retention rate. One of the best ways to achieve this is by studying your loyal customers. After segmenting your target audience condense it further down to the 100 consumers with the most lifetime spend. Examine their behavior, how, why and where they purchased, and then you can focus your efforts to attract similar consumers. Consider every campaign, data point and KPI and you’ll learn vast amounts about how your customers are interacting with your brand. Take the time to reevaluate past performance and imbue your findings into your new strategies. After a certain point, your content will be so polished it will answer any and all questions your customers have and offer new solutions to their needs.

Retarget prospects and customers – Retargeting is one of the most powerful ways to reincorporate your data findings back into the marketing pipeline by attracting “lookalike audiences” or existing customers to your brand. It’s the process of using the data you’ve amassed along with the knowledge you have of their customer journey to inject your marketing strategy with specific, actionable detail. After all, they have already expressed interest of some level in your brand—whether it’s an ad click, blog post view, or comment on your socials. If you nudge them again with a killer offer, you will likely compel them to recommit to your company.