Last updated on
January 9, 2024
In the modern era, data is everything. The power of data collection and analytics gives companies the tools they need to excel over competitors, generate new leads, and understand their customers like never before. In digital marketing, data analytics are a game-changer.
But the breadth and nebulousness of data can be a challenge in itself. Many marketers struggle to understand how to generate applicable insights and how to utilize data analytics for ideal results.
That’s why it’s essential to first understand what data analytics is and what it can do. Then, a series of best practices will help you apply insights into actionable marketing strategies.
With these techniques, you can build better marketing campaigns all around the power of data.
When it comes to the world of data, many terms are thrown around. Big data, business intelligence, data analytics, and more all indicate the tools and methods for deriving applicable marketing insights. It’s data analytics, however, that we want to focus on.
Data analytics is powered by big data or data sets that are so large that traditional processes can’t analyze them. Big data analytics, then, is a growing field in which skilled professionals apply all kinds of tools and tech to generate insights from massive data sets.
Data analytics is the process of finding patterns, forming narratives, and applying the algorithms necessary to understand a system. For digital marketers, little is more important. Online global audiences are huge, as is the amount of content out there competing for their attention. To generate more leads, higher conversion rates, and greater customer satisfaction, you have to truly understand what customers want and how to give it to them.
In the world of eCommerce, data analytics is your most powerful tool for creating effective campaigns. Here are just some of the details effective data analysis can help you understand:
What more could any marketer want? With the data surrounding and informing these points, eCommerce professionals can craft the narratives and customer profiles they need to make successful appeals to an audience’s attention. From there, anything is possible.
Data analytics can be your best friend in the marketing world. But without the proper application of this powerful tool, you won’t achieve the success you want. Therefore, it’s vital to understand the right ways to go about gathering insights.
Fortunately, making the best use of data analytics isn’t quite as difficult as it might seem. Sure, it always helps to have a professional on hand, someone who’s dedicated their career to assembling and processing vast stores of data. But not every company will have the means to staff such an individual. Instead, we all need to gain a better understanding of data analytics to achieve greater success in the digital marketplace.
From the initial processes of collating your information to your methods of evaluation, your data and your means for assessing it can make or break your marketing success. These best practices will help you utilize data analytics to their fullest potential. And it all starts with how you gather your data.
Your data analytics strategy hinges on your ability to gather the right kind of customer information. This means data that is relevant and impactful to the marketing process. If you’re looking in the wrong places for eCommerce insights, your campaigns will ultimately suffer.
Fortunately, however, there is a host of tools out there for tracking useful metrics and assembling practical insights. These range from free to paid modules, software applications, and AI-powered algorithms. The most popular, of course, is the free Google Analytics platform that allows you to observe and analyze all of your website metrics on a comprehensive dashboard.
Alternatively, there are insights applications attached to a majority of the major social media platforms. You can use these to gather valuable multichannel data.
But what should you be looking for? Capturing useful customer information effectively requires that you ask yourself a series of questions before you determine which metrics to track. These questions include:
From there, you can better understand what numbers are worth gathering into a comprehensive data management system. This will be a vital tool in your ability to effectively analyze data, giving you a singular dashboard for collecting your insights.
Understand what metrics are most revealing when it comes to digital marketing, then feed that information through an efficient data management system. You can also use the CRM and Google Analytics integration for deeper insights into the behavioral interactions of your leads.
Once you’ve cultivated the metrics you need for success, it’s time to map the customer journey onto each data point. By doing this, you can create a visual representation of all the ways your marketing endeavors impact different elements of the sales process and more properly form narratives around customer success.
In fact, mapping the customer journey is necessary for all kinds of lead generation. Because of the nature of digital marketing, you must cultivate content at every stage that will help bring in customers and build greater conversion rates. The important customer journey stages to understand are:
By understanding each of these stages and how data can inform them, you mitigate the risk of losing customers at each one. For example, a high unsubscribe rate in your email marketing efforts indicates a failure in the consideration stage. Mapping these connections can help you focus on how to apply data for greater success.
But your insights won’t map onto all audiences the same way. That’s why it’s also necessary to segment your customer profiles.
Segmentation is the process of grouping your customer information into more easily manageable and useful profiles. This means crafting customer personas that represent a conglomerate of the data you’ve gathered.
Customer data profiles and personas are especially useful in digital marketing because they allow you to craft more specific messaging calibrated specifically to a target audience. From your streamlined data-gathering efforts, you should be able to pull vital customer information from the web. Then, you can build effective data profiles that truly give you actionable insights into a diverse customer base.
For each of your customer profiles, you should assemble information like:
With profiles that contain data points like these, you can target your marketing efforts to more specifically meet the needs of certain audiences. This is especially useful when attempting to reach a new niche market or customer base.
For example, if you sell time management software and want to expand into the gig economy market, you can assess how this demographic responds to different types of outreach. Conduct surveys, email campaigns, and targeted ads, and use the data to build better profiles.
The more customer profiles you have the better you can tailor marketing content to certain audiences. However, your best bet is to also use modern tools like segment or it's alternatives to personalize marketing however you can.
Personalization is one of the most powerful innovations of the eCommerce industry. Driven by AI algorithms, personalization gives customers product recommendations, messaging, and other content that is directly tied to their own data. This helps to cut down on the frustration of encountering ads while boosting conversion rates through more relevant marketing.
You’ve no doubt encountered personalized marketing on the web. Companies like Amazon and Netflix use this to recommend new products and shows, offer deals, and retain customers. The result is an environment of engagement that eCommerce customers have come to expect.
By instituting personalization in everything from the promotions you advertise to the visuals you use to increase click rates on your site, you can drive a more immersive digital experience. Your ability to do this depends on your site’s data infrastructure and capacity to adapt to each customer.
Use data-driven content management systems to institute greater levels of personalization. The more you personalize everything from your marketing emails to the recommended products you show on your online store, the better you can appeal to every customer. But without data analytics, none of this would be possible.
You need the tools and data streams to effectively analyze data in real-time if you want to offer truly personalized content. Find AI systems and encourage customer account creation to manage data that can be consistently analyzed.
Take opportunities like these to personalize your content, but don’t forget to evaluate your success.
Last but not least, we must stress the importance of ongoing evaluation in your data analytics efforts. The success of your data application is one more metric you have to keep track of, following every insight you apply to determine success or failure.
Start by instituting an effective platform for measuring metrics over time. Traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics can even do the trick. Then be sure to keep a record of when you instituted data-driven insights into your marketing efforts.
Your map of marketing actions should follow your data analytics if you hope to reveal the effects of your endeavors. But not all patterns will directly correlate. For example, if you launched your new campaign right as theCOVID-19 pandemic hit and saw only failure, then that insight might not mean much. After all, you have to consider how larger trends are also influencing your success.
Make use of all your data to effectively evaluate your success, bringing in industry trends, competitor information, and major world events. Then, repeat this evaluative process at regular intervals. From there, you’ll have the resources you need to devise better insights.
By following these best practices for utilizing data analytics, you can all but guarantee more effective eCommerce campaigns. After all, data makes the digital world go around. Use the power of this incredible tool to understand your customers and improve your marketing at every turn.
Rukham is the Content Lead at Mailmunch. He believes trust should be the basis for all marketing communications.
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