Market research is a key aspect of an ecommerce website’s marketing strategy. Here are four ways to conduct market research.
1. Website analytics data
First, it is important to know how your website is doing. Review your ecommerce website’s analytics to find out how many visitors are visiting the website per month.
If your business does not currently have an analytics programme to track these statistics, don’t worry – it’s easy to set up and there are free products out there for you to use. Google Analytics is the easiest free tool that offers both basic and advanced information about visitors.
Within your website analytics, find the breakdown of visitors per country. Look for any trends in the data: are you seeing an increase of traffic from a specific location? The analytics should also be able to provide you with information about the visitors, such as what language their computer uses. Take note of what languages are most popular, this is valuable market research.
2. Shopping cart analytics
Review your shopping cart analytics for country shopping patterns. Most shopping cart programmes include a section that offers various reports and statistics about your customers and their sales.
Again, if your current shopping site does not offer this, Google Analytics can help. All you need to do is insert a line of code to your shopping cat page and shopping basket confirmation page (the page they see after they complete an order).
The shopping cart analytics will give you information about popular products, basket size, busiest periods and more. It is also worth cross-checking this data against your customer demographics – do certain products work better in certain geographies? Where are you shipping to? This information will help to focus your marketing efforts.
3. Market analysis
Look beyond your website – both at other competitors online and offline. It’s much easier to catch a glimpse into a particular selling market using the resources and data from online businesses. Many websites will include a “most popular” widget, take a note of these and try to spot a trend.
It isn’t as easy to conduct market research for brick-and-mortar stores, but it’s worth persevering. What products are doing best on the high street? What trends are you seeing in stores? What is on display and on offer? The answers to these questions will go some way to helping you develop your own marketing strategy.
4. Customer analysis
A key advantage of running an ecommerce website is the ease of collecting customer data (see above). You can also gain a lot of valuable information by gathering information and feedback directly from customers, such as how your business can improve.
From offering polls and questionnaires, to feedback forms and customer-service email addresses, gathering direct input from existing customers and new visitors is an essential market research tool.
The very best ecommerce entrepreneurs will, however, combine all of the above forms of market research.
Developing a bird’s-eye view of the business will give you the insight and information you need to improve your marketing strategy and win more business.
