How to grow your eCommerce business like a PRO
The beauty of eCommerce is that there is so much data at your fingertips that you can use to understand who your customers are and what they want. What separates the minor leagues from the big leagues is how they make sense of all that overwhelming data.
The phenomenon of eCommerce and the way demand generation has changed — with influencers and social media, is intriguing in its effectiveness and virality. Of course, there’s technology at the center of the story. Every eCommerce store has to have some marketing tech stack. A real-time personalization engine is essential for lifestyle brands. Owners that sell across Amazon, Shopify, and WooCommerce have even more complex tech stacks when it comes to reporting. The challenge of tech stacks that get increasingly multifaceted is the effort of bringing all the information together to make sense of it: Yup, fragmented data.
VIEWN’s customer data platform (CDP) can help by bringing all the data together; and cleaning and formatting it to amplify the demand generation strategies that business owners make for their eCommerce stores. A CDP can help bring in more sales with all its features focused on activating customer data.
“Consumers spent $466 billion online in the U.S. between March and September of this year, up 52% from the same period last year.”
How a CDP software works in your marketing stack
A marketing stack is the set of applications and tools a brand needs to nurture and engage customers for sales. For example, a typical marketing stack for medium-sized businesses includes Shopify, Mailchimp for email marketing, Google Analytics, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Ads. Adding offline data, like influencer commissions, needs to be captured for reporting purposes as well.
Marketing teams appear to utilize a dozen applications based on observation of their demand-generating and sales activities. Customers expecting more (and using more devices and channels) demand marketers to invest in so many marketing solutions at once.
When data is placed in the center of demand generation activity and is used to drive decision-making and tactics, a CDP becomes a necessary, central component of the demand gen engine.
The CDP Institute cites the core characteristics of a CDP:
- Pull data from multiple sources
- Clean and combine data into individual profiles, and
- Structure the data for other marketing systems to use
Data fragmentation occurs when customer data gets siloed into different applications. This fragmentation leads to a CDP’s first challenge — connecting the pieces and delivering a single customer view. Not to put too fine a print, but this particular challenge is enormously challenging and can take time and expertise. The data needs to be clean, formatted, and understood in its context.
Identity management is how we organize individuals into profiles. And once you have the profiles, the data is unlocked to produce all the exciting marketing value of effective demand generation.
CDPs allow you to engage customer segments in their journeys
Even for fast-moving sales related to eCommerce stores, it’s still important to engage customers actively. The engagement flows are what become different customer journeys. I find that emails become an effective strategy because you can set up a series of automated and rule-based flows.
With your order data, you can start to distill even more advanced customer segments using a CDP. A CDP can bring in information, not just behavioral data from your email systems but also psychographic data from surveys and lead generation forms. Media usage and consumption would also be fascinating to investigate when defining valued segments for Shopify.
Customer journey analytics is also a CDP benefit, albeit a very challenging solution to go after. When customer data comes from different applications, then data fragmentation and gaps become harder to fill over the same customer journey. Marketers will often complain about having a messy funnel. It’s the same problem that needs Identity Management and Contextualization. Both are robust features of CDPs and what makes it possible to evaluate what is going on in a multi-channel customer journey.
CDPs help ease the customer journey
The general rule of thumb in customer experience (CX) is that the less customer effort, the better the throughput. Customer effort works like friction in the buyer journey but uncovering the right tactics that don’t turn off your customer segments in streamlining will be necessary.
When discussing solutions for contactless customer journeys at the beginning of the COVID-19 re-opening, I mention many tools that streamline the order and payment process that enhance the overall CX while offering digital channels preferred by their target customers. You often hear marketers and customer experience experts refer to this as the multi-touch multi-channel customer experience. Products and services that require consideration have more complex business journeys. That’s not to say a Shopify experience does not also stand to gain efficiencies in the checkout process.
eCommerce and Shopify thrive in the contactless world. Designing intuitive order flows that include customizations and personalized orders does tend to open a can of worms for marketers when analyzing downstream. But studying the products that move the best against your most valued customer segments allows you to consider the menu, ordering process, and the overall product mix. It is essential to have just the right amount to offer, especially when screen space is valuable.
With the sales information cross-referenced against audience profiles, plus engagement data, a CDP can begin to distill customer segments organically. At VIEWN, we are taking machine learning approaches to evaluate the natural characteristics that drive customer segments.
CDPs help you generate better content with segmented data
Segments really can’t function without understanding the proper why. The best and most efficient way is to ask your customers. We partnered with CEO Analytics to get data-driven attitudes directly from the customers you have that can take you to a whole different level in terms of the segments you can get.
Understanding customer attitudes within segments point to the specific reasons why customers consider and buy products from your brand. We all do things for a reason; for example, we pick up pre-packaged food because we are always on the go. Or we choose to get fit once the promotion is in sight.
When you look at customer segments in terms of what they want, where they are, and what they’re looking at,t it’s much easier to develop a targeted message. The customer segmentation you get from a CDP allows you to take a different profile strategy and approach different segments accordingly across the same social platforms.
Like evaluating social ads’ success, eCommerce marketers can use the segmentation you can get from an active CDP and customer list to evaluate content performance and be more prescriptive. There’s no doubt that when you write content that resonates with people, they will continue to read longer.
Investing in a good customer data platform can save your business’ marketing budget in the long run. Make sense of the data you already have, know what works for your customer segments, and meet them where they are in their journeys. Work like a pro with VIEWN and watch your eCommerce business grow!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
