5 Methods of Using Analytics To Improve Customer Experience and Drive eCommerce

A lot goes into developing and maintaining a comprehensive eCommerce website. You might offer various good quality products. You may be phenomenal at writing website copy. Your eCommerce marketing skills like email marketing, social media strategy, and paid advertising would be top-notch. But it all boils down to how the customer reacts to it.

Even if your website has all the eCommerce capabilities, you still have to decide where to spend time improving your website’s customer experience. The answer lies in “Customer Analytics”.

To completely perceive customer analytics, you should be tracking everything that you can. You need to drill into the various data points and understand what they mean. Then, decide what questions you want to answer about your eCommerce performance and how you’ll combine this analysis into your eCommerce strategy.

Once you’re looking at the accurate data, you can begin using the analytics to improve the customer experience.

Let us first understand what Customer Analytics is?

Customer analytics means gathering data points that show when, how and who the customers are communicating with. Understanding those questions can help you know what’s resonating amongst your diverse customer segments.

All of your initiatives will have some form of customer analytics connected to them. Consider your business website and these patterns of related customer analytics:

• The number of daily page views viewed by the visitors
• The number of visitors who engage with a highlighted homepage banner offer
• Percentage of visitors who bounce compared to those who stay
• The amount of time spent by average users on a particular page.

These metrics can help you better understand the performance of your website. However, these numbers fluctuate somewhat erratically, and few factors affecting these may be out of your control as well.

If you notice a lower-than-average number of page views on the weekend, it could be because you just changed your Google Ads campaign — or maybe the majority of your audience favours to shop during the week.

The only way to analyze your analytics is by comprehending. Once you dig deep into your data, you can begin making informed decisions about what’s working and what changes you should make going ahead to improve the overall customer experience.

The Ins and Outs of Customer Analytics

Understanding and analyzing customer behaviour using analytics needs looking at the various areas of your business, asking questions, and diving into the intricacies.

Your medium of choice for most of these foundational figures will be Google Analytics, which is, in fact, free to use. But, multiple tools you use to build your eCommerce experience will also come into action to give you a more granular knowledge of specific areas of your business.

Additionally, Google Analytics is restricted to your website. It doesn’t provide a complete picture of your marketing activities, such as email marketing performance or social engagement performance.

The extent and intensity of analytics you can collect depend on how many tools and combinations you rely on and the volume of data they provide. That said, there are plenty of questions that customer analytics can answer that will be crucial to developing a stellar customer experience.

The discussion on the significance of customer experience is already accomplished. A Forrester study proved that “CX leaders gain revenue faster than CX stragglers.” Nonetheless, most businesses are still striving to maintain and enhance customer journeys and experiences and essentially measure them.

Even CX leaders find it challenging to find the quantitative link between customer behaviour and business results to move ahead, relying on gut feel and qualitative data to prioritize decisions.

If you feel the same, then here’s how you can enhance the experience of your visitors using customer analytics.

Analyze the footfall of your visitors

Analysis of the people who come to you is at the core of customer experience. This information tells you about your customer’s journey and where your customer’s feet move throughout your online store. While this data doesn’t put you in the visitors head, it offers insights into customer psychology, which can further be used to tap on the crucial touchpoints.

So, what exactly can we learn from footfall analytics?

Firstly, it will help you to trace how exactly your visitors move through the store. You can discover hiccups or places where the visitor’s journey comes to a standstill. This is a clear indication of some bottleneck or unoptimized area.

Additionally, you learn what products are often purchased together. Habitually we only notice customers when they walk in the entrance and when they exit. There’s this whole middle section—the actual act of buying—that we can’t keep track of without customer experience data.

And if we can’t trace customer’s journey, how can we possibly improve it?

Identify Customer Experience Hiccups

Perhaps there’s a segment in your eCommerce store that’s largely ignored. A category of items that you’re confident your shoppers would approve. However, it turns out the visitors are complicated by the website layout and never manage to reach the category.

A data-driven customer experience approach shows how the in-store customer experience influences the bottom line. With data, business owners and marketers recognize the need to revamp their store’s layout and label items precisely to enhance the customer’s experience, making the customer journey as seamless as possible.

Discover Items That Are Usually Bought Together

Let us look at a short story to explain our next point. What follows is an anecdotal tale about a well-known brand. Analysts noticed that some young men buying through their online store would buy diapers on Friday noon, then spend some time browsing on the website and ended up purchasing beer.

The odd combination was Diapers + Beer.

The thought that shoppers would purchase beer and diapers never occurred to marketers. How was it possible? What an odd combination. Customer experience data exposes items customers usually buy together, sometimes in unintuitive orders. Now this story is an urban myth. The lesson, however, is real. Customer experience analytic tools recognize patterns that the human eye may miss.

So, what can be done with this information?

Well, you might design your store to move the items closer together. Doing so may also encourage impulse buying. If nothing else, it enhances the customer’s experience by simplifying their journey.

Customer Experience Personalization

A trend that’s become increasingly evident: customers desire a personal experience. We live in an advanced era where people carry more knowledge in their pockets than the collective history of all previous civilizations.

What are we trying to say?

We are trying to say that consumers are well informed. They know what they want, and they prefer having it served on a silver platter. After all, it’s a quick swipe to check out the newest trends, business reviews, product pricing, ratings etc.

Businesses should utilize customer experience analytics tools to identify the browsing and buying patterns, ensuring that customers receive the experience they desire from the get-go.

Provide A Unique Service Using Customer Analytics

Data about demanding customers helps companies promote a service that caters to shoppers on a personal level.

Businesses like spas use customer experience data to look up what treatments their clients received in the past. This data informs the brand about client expectations and convertible recommendations.

Even an online store can trace the repetitive buying habits of their consumers and help them by suggesting the same products at the estimated time of purchase.

In this way, the service becomes more than an exchange of goods and more than a transaction. A business finds an evolving relationship with customers — all thanks to analytics.

Conclusion

Today, many companies evaluate how technologies and cloud-based communication solutions can connect the dots to fix broken customer experiences. It’s a common observation that promoting CX can also improve ROI, enhance conversion rate, increase shopper’s loyalty, improve productivity, and reduce expenses.

Take the next step in investigating what an improved customer experience can do for your business. Learn how Apexon delivers customer-centric solutions to clients.

Whether you run a B2B, B2C or unified business platform, the CX implementation by Apexon for its clients is backed by factual data, and analysis implementation is wholly focused on customer satisfaction.

Contact us to learn how Apexon can deliver an evolving Customer Experience for your business.