How to leverage your customer data to drive online sales.

Creating a personalized consumer experience on your website can help increase online sales, but many ecommerce companies struggle with the best ways to provide website visitors with the convenience of relevant recommended products or money-saving offers. By mining your customer database for prior sales information, abandoned cart data, and average purchase prices, you can drive customers to tailored landing pages designed to speak to them, wherever they are on the buyers’ journey.

Using your customer database to drive sales

You may not realize how much information your customer relationship management (CRM), or customer database, holds. Integrating your CRM with your ecommerce platform and your other data collection points through a customer data platform gives you access to this information to create better, more relevant sales and insightful marketing campaigns designed to increase online sales.

Curate data from various sources, pull it together into your CDP and use it to deliver a personalized experience every time a visitor shops on your ecommerce site.

Sources of relevant customer data include:

• Social media accounts
• Onsite actions, such as purchases or abandoned carts
• Web browsing history (through the use of cookies on your site)
• Responses to direct email and SMS campaigns

For instance, you can leverage remarketing or retargeting tactics in social media advertising and deliver a 10% coupon to a web visitor who clicks on your ad multiple times without making a purchase. Similarly, you can use abandoned shopping cart data to deliver personalized SMS or social media advertising with deals for the items the shopper left behind.

Balance customer privacy with convenience

While striving to create personalized experiences, many ecommerce companies struggle with the delicate dance between customer privacy and using their customer databases to deliver a more relevant user experience. A report from SmarterH revealed that 86% of consumers worry about data privacy. By the same token, 72% only want to engage with personalized marketing messages.

However, if you’re marketing to the younger generations, the outlook improves. Millennials and Gen Z seemed to be about 47% more trusting than Baby Boomers or Gen X shoppers.

By providing all your customers with a secure ecommerce platform, you can give them the peace of mind they seek from online retailers. Your privacy policy should be transparent and emphasize that you are using their data only to create a more useful, personalized shopping experience for them

Dive into predictive analytics

The sky’s the limit when it comes to delivering more-relevant shopping selections to drive sales on your ecommerce site — and in your accompanying brick-and-mortar stores, for that matter. Leveraging information from your customer database can increase online sales by allowing you to offer:

• Customized shopping selections (“You may also like …”)
• Personalized pricing based on past customer behaviours
• In-stock merchandise without shipping delays

A BARC research report showed that businesses that used big data increased profits by 8% while reducing costs by 10%.

Manage inventory with information from your customer database

You could lose sales if popular items are frequently unavailable on your website. To avoid that problem, connect your CRM with your inventory management system and use predictive analytics to determine the right quantities of products to buy. This can help your ecommerce site manage seasonality related to purchases. Predictive analytics can also help you spot purchasing trends so you can always be prepared with the right inventory at the right time.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to not only pinpoint the holiday season’s hottest toy but have enough in stock to keep your customers happy? Or to have home goods on hand that reflect next year’s design trends?

Increase conversions with the right experience at the right time

In addition to helping you keep the products your customers want on hand for immediate shipping, big data can help you increase online sales through pop-up ads and special offers. It works by predicting what action your website visitors are likely to take next — and changing that action with an offer they can’t refuse.

For instance, predictive analytics can drive the customer experience on your site and help increase online sales by:

• Offering a coupon if the visitor joins the mailing list before leaving the site.
• Reminding customers of items still in their shopping carts.
• Offering an ebook or more information about your products (in exchange for their addresses).

Personalization also means delivering the right product recommendations through various channels, including email, category pages, paid ads, and even welcome messages on your website. Further, using retargeting tactics in Facebook and Google advertising campaigns enables you to “follow” your customers in their online travels. As long as your offers are relevant and timely, you’ll drive them back to your site to make a purchase.

Additionally, when returning customers start poking around your site, you can remind them it’s time to purchase a specific product again or send timely emails nudging them to reorder a product they might be running low on. The goal is to make your customer feel as if you are choosing their favourite products every time they visit your site — because you are! It’s like having their own personal shopper or a best friend who knows what they love right on their computer.

With the rise in online spending due to the COVID-19 pandemic, now more than ever, a personalized ecommerce business strategy could help you drive more sales. If you’re ready to make a plan, get in touch with our consultants today.

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