How to Maximize the Use of Data Analytics for Your Online Business
We always hear about how data is becoming increasingly important. But enormous amounts of raw and unstructured data don’t have value. This is where data analytics comes in. Data analytics has changed every industry, particularly online businesses, and e-commerce. Companies can leverage data analytics for data-driven decision-making, reduce costs, and stay on top of market shifts. Despite this, many online businesses fail to maximize their business’s multiple data streams. So here are some steps you can take to fully reap the benefits of data analytics for your online business:
Learning data analytics
As mentioned above, data analytics allows companies to arrive at data-driven business decisions. But this cannot be achieved without business leaders understanding the insights to their full extent.
Management consulting firm Navigate’s Phil Schmoyer told CIO that even if you hire an analyst, you should still be knowledgeable in data science and involved in planning data collection and interpreting the data. But this requires learning the basics of data science. Most of the online tools used currently are very intuitive and will help professionals digest a wide range of information. Each one will often also come with a tutorial. Even for smaller business owners, platforms like Udacity and Dataquest provide tiered data science learning programs. This allows users to grasp the different aspects of data science.
Professionals that already have online businesses also need to be aware of how data can be collected. Over 800,000 students are currently taking data analytics courses on Udemy, and the most popular tutorials include using Python and Excel to collect important pieces of information. And most of these students will already have flourishing online businesses – they want to increase their skill set to help them make more informed decisions. Leveraging data analytics for your business requires a strong knowledge foundation to optimize its use properly. Learning online is the quickest and most cost-efficient way to get up to speed.
Enhancing Customer Profiling
Data transformation in e-commerce provides insights and innovation necessary for growth. This means opening up new and relevant data streams to optimize insights. Deduplicating your customer base list is just a baseline. To add value, you should enrich your information with third-party tags and data to discover any cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Email sign-ups and social media integration can help deepen and segment your customer profile. Most social media profiles currently include meta tags, geography, job titles, industry, and other behaviors that can supplement your customer profiles. Data analytics can then enable you to recognize high-value customers and improve sales conversions.
Improving Customer Experience
The overall customer experience determines retention and brand loyalty. Some businesses tend to emphasize data collection and not data analysis. It’s not about the amount of data a company collects but how the company utilizes it. Data analytics is about asking the right questions to get the best answer to strengthen your customers’ connection and site. For e-commerce, that should always be “is the customer satisfied with your product/service?” In our post on the ’10 Tips For Effective Competitive Intelligence Gathering’, we explained how best to avoid falling into the trap of copying your competitors. Find out how you can provide a better journey and add value to your customer’s needs through your own data. As online markets continue to grow, employing effective data analytics will soon be what makes or breaks a business.
