Big data will help you sell more efficiently
If you believe the hype, big data does everything: increase sales, cut costs, save you time, walk the dog – you name it. But for ecommerce businesses, at least, you wouldn’t be far wrong (save for looking after your pooch but who knows what the future holds?).
There are multiple ways that you can use data to improve your business and there are so many places to garner data from – social media, CRM software, Google Analytics.
Rather than trying to do too much and analyse every piece of data coming through your business – it may be easier to start off with a few elements of your business which you are going to concentrate on using big data to improve. This can help you to narrow down the pieces of data you are putting value on.
Here’s just a few ways you can use big data to improve your business:
Increase personalisation
Being able to tailor the shopping experience to each customers creates relevance which in turn drives sales. Amazon is one the best exponents of big data – it has been utilising customer information to create personal recommendations for years and reaping the benefits.
“Big data can be used to develop trust and bring relevancy to ecommerce,” says Matt Asay, VP of Corporate Strategy at 10gen.
“For example Shopcade is company which makes clever use of the data it captures. The website allows customers to create pages of their favourite products which they can share in a fun, innovative way. The service then works by analysing customer data to recommend relevant and trending products via their social network.”
Manage your inventory and stock levels
Big data can help you to analyse your product’s performance. If you have certain products that aren’t selling so well, you can delve into the data and find out why. You may find that instead of customers simply not liking the product, they aren’t seeing it – or that the product description needs some work.
Data can also help you to anticipate when you might have high levels of demand by picking up on sales patterns and therefore you can prepare for that demand accordingly. “We have all our customers and everything they have ever done with us logged in our databases,” explains Kate Craig-Wood, founder of SME, IT hosting company Memset.
“This means that we can fairly accurately predict demand for our infrastructure services, which allows us to employ an efficient “just in time” provisioning model.”
Customer service
Having a well-informed customer service team can help to cement your business as a firm favourite with your shoppers. Online retailers often have to work a little harder at this to give people what they need, given that they can’t meet with people and deal with issues in the flesh.
If all of your customer data is organised well and to hand, people seeking help can be dealt with in a more personalised way. Having a customers’ background, including previous complaints or problems can help deal with a situation quickly, in a tailored way.
Flexible pricing
Sometimes you need to give different offers to different people and sometimes you have to change your pricing strategy to react to changes in the market. By understanding your customers better through data, you can see who your marketing efforts and offers should be targeting.
“Big data also enables much better customer understanding e.g. retailers can identify ‘queen bees’ – users that have a disproportionate impact over the users around them – so if a queen bee changes product e.g. mobile phone carrier there is a much higher probability that others in the group will change to the same carrier when their contract allows it,” says Steve Totman, director of strategy, data integration, Syncsort.
By studying the data around your competitors, your customers’ actions and regional preferences you can also come up with competitive pricing strategies that are dynamic and win conversions.
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