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How Customer Data and Advanced Analytics Are Defining Customer Experience in E-commerce

Dana Toušová
October 27, 2021 | 7.5 min read
The most useful online analytics are not just a snapshot of the past, but a prediction of how things will be in the future. With advanced analytics, retailers can target their customers with even more precision and relevance through personalization.

Why customer analytics matters

Today, businesses are generating enormous amounts of data every second due to online interactions. The challenge is how can we make use of this massive amount of data?

E-commerce is the fastest growing retail channel in the world. Online retailers are increasingly focusing on customer analytics to make better business decisions. E-commerce companies can leverage customer analytics to increase sales. Customer analytics helps e-retailers gain key insights into customer behavior. Companies can then use such insights to improve their own businesses.

E-commerce marketers with the help of their data science and BI teams are turning towards advanced analytics, using artificial intelligence, to get the most out of their marketing efforts. Advanced analytics in e-commerce helps you in understanding your customers better, predict their behavior, and provide them with just what they want, when they want it.

What is customer data?

Customer data is the most valuable asset of any business. This data helps companies to improve their services and offerings, devise new strategies and communication campaigns, and predict future trends based on existing customer behavior.

Marketers use different tools to collect customer data: surveys, mailing lists, contact forms, social media accounts, and CRM systems. Also, marketers frequently use multiple sources of information to validate and enrich the collected data. Businesses can also benefit from third-party sources such as reports from experts or studies conducted by independent research companies.

Why are companies investing in customer data?

Companies use customer data for a wide range of purposes, from improving their products and services to increasing revenue. Data is the foundation upon which any modern business is built, and it can be used in many ways to improve your company’s performance. Customer data is incredibly valuable to e-commerce companies. In fact, customer data has been growing in value for years, and with the rise of advanced analytics using data science, this trend will continue.

But that is not the only reason companies are investing so heavily into collecting data on their customers. By analyzing customer data, businesses can predict future behavior and preferences, and this allows them to market their products more effectively. Companies can also use this information to inform new product portfolio decisions and improve business operations overall.

In the past, most companies considered customer data to be a liability. They worked to protect their customers from theft and abuse by using it as little as possible. Today, more and more businesses are considering customer data an asset that can help them build new revenue streams and improve relationships with customers.

Customer data and analytics: defining customer experience in e-commerce

Today, most e-commerce companies are experiencing a huge influx of data, which is complicating decision-making across the business. The problem is that they often lack an overarching customer data strategy to identify insights, or there is a gap in the execution of such data strategy, to have positive effects on the performance.

The ability to collect and understand customer behavior in real-time can enable e-commerce businesses to deliver personalized experiences that drive significant revenue growth. E-commerce businesses can use analytics to upgrade their customer experience through better product recommendations, targeted advertising, and cross-selling opportunities.

Customer data is the fuel needed to power online stores. If retailers do not have it, they are forced to make decisions based on assumptions rather than facts. The good news is that customer data can be collected and analyzed in a number of ways that can help improve the customer experience.

in the essential thing in collecting customer data is for businesses to understand which types of information will be useful for their business goals. By looking at what competitors are doing, businesses should be able to determine how much information they need and where it must come from.

It is essential to assess the business challenge and prepare the analytics roadmap to match your business and analytics goals.

The role of advanced analytics using data science in the e-commerce

Data science is currently the most trending expertise in the world and it’s all about data. Data is everywhere. The amount of data we consume and produce on a daily basis has exploded exponentially over the past few years. The Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud computing, and even artificial intelligence (AI) are all different ways that businesses use to bring more value from their huge quantities of data. They help us make better decisions based on reliable information. As such, they are making our lives easier by automating what we do every day.

By applying customer analytics using data science to their business, online retail firms can do a number of things, including predictive customer segmentation, or increasing upsells, cross-sales, and average order values by utilizing recommenders.

We assist our clients by providing expert analysts and data scientists to use analytics that focus on increasing revenues, decreasing customer churn, and utilizing their data. Simplity offers descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics services to help clients meet their goals.

Next steps to customer analytics

Retailers must amplify their online marketing strategies by ensuring it delivers maximum effectiveness. Delivering seamless customer experiences online also helps increase sales and to grow your business.

Customer analytics is the use of data to understand individual customers, their preferences, and buying habits. Use customer analytics to create more personalized experiences for customers. To learn more about how to leverage customer analytics for your business, download our whitepaper – How to Boost E-commerce Success with Customer Analytics.

This whitepaper will provide you with more information on how to use customer analytics in e-commerce, common roadblocks in driving insights from customer analytics, roles helping with or using customer analytics. Additionally, it gives you details on when it is convenient to outsource customer analytics to external service providers with tips on how to choose such providers along with a checklist for leveraging customer analytics. Get your free copy.

Dana Toušová
VP Marketing