Every effective ecommerce director knows that big data is critical to creating a great customer experience. Yet with big data comes big challenges.
Data-driven ecommerce teams are much more likely to turn a profit. Theyare a remarkable 23 times more likely to acquire customers than their non-data-driven peers. They are six times more likely to retain customers. And they are 19 times more likely to be profitable as a result. But, with so much data coming in and out of an online store, day in day out, it’s a big challenge to instil the actionable insights needed to drive digital success.
In this blog, we’ll explore the top 9 challenges facing ecommerce directors today, how they can use big data to solve them – and the simple solution for monitoring all data-driven ecommerce activities.
Every year, a truly staggering $18bn worth of goods is left abandoned in carts as ecommerce brands experience an average cart abandonment rate of 69.57%. Those are some pretty sobering stats for an ecommerce director.
Therefore, it’s critical that online retailers use the data they hold on their shoppers to win back these lost carts. Teams need to analyse exactly where it is that they are losing customers during their journey and take proactive measures to address any problems they face on the way. Luckily, with the right level of checkout optimisation, experts predict online retailers can improve conversions by more than 35%.
For online retailers, generating targeted traffic is a growing challenge. At the beginning of the millennium, having a website was enough to drive traffic and conversions. Now that more than 547200 websites are created every day, the process is a lot more complicated.
Ecommerce directors must use data-driven marketing approaches that target the specific customers they are trying to reach. And it’s no longer enough for an online retailer to rely on just one channel to drive traffic to their website. Today, effectively generating targeted traffic requires a combined effort of PPC, SEO, email, social, shopping engines, affiliates… we could go on. But, this data-driven, omnichannel approach means juggling multiple campaigns and monitoring huge amounts of data – more than any human is capable of. With employees trying to keep track of all this information, valuable insights often fall through the cracks.
One way to tackle this problem is to implement a system of automatic alerts. Google Analytics has some handy alerts that let teams know when numbers go above or below a certain threshold. However, our AI KPI tracking and anomaly detection tool, Millimetric, alerts you to unseen anomalies and digital performance opportunities in real time, making it the perfect platform for the fast-paced, real-time data-driven world of ecommerce.
You probably already know that attracting new customers is significantly more expensive that retaining the ones you’ve already got. In fact, it can cost almost five times more to attract new shoppers. And, according to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25-95%. Moving the needle in regards to customer churn is therefore a key concern for ecommerce directors.
So, how does big data play into this? Well, in order to address customer churn, you need to understand your customers. To know your customers you need to understand your data, so you can see where they are coming from, the journeys they are making, their demographics and more. This information builds actionable insights which, in turn, can be developed into concrete plans to address customer churn.
Seasonality brings fluctuations in demand that can be a huge challenge for ecommerce directors. For many retailers, the period leading up to Black Friday, Christmas and New Year is their busiest, for example. For others, it’s the summer.
The busyness of certain periods of the year means that heads of ecommerce must be fully prepared for what’s to come.
