How to Grow Your ECommerce Business Using Customer Data
Data offers an exciting chance to get to know your customers and grow your eCommerce business. For many eCommerce business owners, however, collecting, organizing, and analyzing data and making data-driven decisions feels daunting. Luckily, there are some simple steps you can take to running your first customer data collection and analysis campaign.
- Make sure your GDPR compliant
Data privacy is a huge concern for customers and businesses alike. If you plan on collecting data of any kind, even email addresses for a newsletter, you need to make sure your business and website are GDPR compliant. Do your research, be transparent with your customers, and consider finding consent management platform software that will manage your cookie consent banners and privacy notices.
- Identify your goals
Collecting customer data is a great way to get to know your customers, but it’s essential that you have specific goals in mind. Do you want to create an ideal buyer persona so you can revamp your marketing strategy? Do you want to increase average order values on your website? Having specific goals means you won’t be overwhelmed with large amounts of data and no clear purpose.
- Figure out what kind of data you’re collecting
Generally, there are three types of customer data: personal, psychographic, and behavioral data. Personal data includes age, gender, education, income, and marital status. Psychographic data covers the customer’s interests, activities, and opinions. Behavioral data includes the customer’s purchase history and patterns and the lifespan of their loyalty to the brand. If you plan on collecting customer data, figure out which kind you want to and are able to collect and how useful it will be to your growth strategy.
- Determine how you’ll collect data
First-party data – data given to you directly by your customers – can be collected via contact forms, surveys, and information provided at checkout, as well as interactions between customers and your customer service team. Second and third-party data, data published by your competitors or by data aggregators will give you insight into your competition and the broader market. This guide to improving your eCommerce customer data collection methods is a great read if you want to sharpen your collection methods.
- Use data analysis software
Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to make sense of it all. It may seem daunting, but there is a lot of tech out there that helps businesses organize and analyze their data. Customer survey software like Typeform and SurveyMonkey, behavioral analysis tools like Google Analytics, and social monitoring software like Hootsuite and Sprout Social are a handful of the wide selection of data analysis tools available.
- Test-run data-driven strategies
You’ve collected and analyzed your data – it’s time to use it! Hopefully, the data collected will be useful to the goal you set yourself at the start of the process. This will help you make data-driven decisions and experiment with new strategies or products based on this data. Implement specific improvements in a test run, assess the success of the test run, and then integrate changes across your business.