Author: Balderick Bissessur, Data Analytics Consultant, Revonic
There’s a level of digital transformation most businesses are currently undergoing due to the impact of COVID-19. While we’re seeing some companies propelling their eCommerce sites to the next level, quite a few are also missing the mark. eCommerce is not rocket science, but there are a few minimum requirements to follow best practice, like optimal shopping cart journeys, easy checkout processes and engaging content.
The common denominator focusses on improved customer interaction, and now more than ever, businesses must understand and learn about their users, how they interact with their brand and what their behaviour is within their eCommerce journey.
Every time a customer interacts with your eCommerce channel, from a tracking perspective, it creates a “data touchpoint”, and it is without a doubt one of my favourite topics. It can occur at any time throughout the customer’s journey and is an essential element for a company to gather data from for analysis.
Because eCommerce is fueled by data, it is crucial to understand your consumers’ touchpoints within your brand purchase journey to drive business performance.
I would like to share a few principles on how you can tackle data touchpoints to help you drive conversion:
To leverage points of contact with your audience, you must first know more about them, including what the interactions are and where they take place. Therefore, it’s crucial to reference your customer journey map for a specific product or service. As a reminder, a customer journey map is a strategic assessment of where your customers are interacting with your business and how they eventually purchase a product or service.
Armed with this information, you can measure results and make improvements to facilitate a better user experience across every touchpoint. Remember to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, use customer journey maps and customer experience maps and categorise your customer touchpoints.
You can identify your potential data touchpoints with the following steps:
It’s great to understand which digital channel has been driving your sales the most. Once you have your customers’ data, you can use it for marketing and retargeting purposes. This data can be stored within a Data Management Platform (DMP).
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable metric that shows the value of a specific event or interaction to influence business decision making processes.
Adopting KPI’s will lead to the visibility of your business performance within your eCommerce journey and eventually drive more sales.
By having KPI’s in place, it will make each step of the journey accountable to performance and ensure that progress will be noted after implementing changes within your website design and journey.
Most metrics can be categorised within these four pillars:
Landing page metrics focus on the consumer landing on your website and from what channel they are coming from. Think of unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, exit rate.
Awareness metrics focus on your target audience becoming more aware of the products and services that you offer. For example; social media reach, shared count, total returning visitors, share of voice, session quality.
Interaction metrics focus on your target audience on what they “do” on your website. Any element that requires the consumer to perform a particular action is an interaction, for example, click-through rate (CTR), internal searches and product views.
Purchase funnel metrics focus on any measurable value that can be derived from analysing your checkout funnel and eventually the purchase. The most obvious one is the number of sales, but this is also applicable to form abandonment rates, drop-off rates and add-to-cart ratios.
It is great to have all the data available; however, if the insights that are derived from your data analysis are not clearly understood, then all your work will be futile.
Therefore, the most critical part of data analysis is arguably the visualisation. Data analysts and data scientists visualise data by using a visualisation tool to make this data easily accessible to all respective stakeholders within their organisation. This enables better insights and business decisions.
From my experience, I recommend having separate dashboards to analyse your product performance, customer interaction and engagement and purchase funnel journeys. All these dashboards will be based on the objectives and KPI’s that you have identified in the first two principles.
These dashboards will become increasingly bespoke as you have more data available over time. Most importantly, keep these dashboards simple and effective. Remember, data is nothing unless we can drive actionable business insights from it.
Understand your business, translate these into business objectives, define your KPI’s, and lastly create a reporting system to drive data-driven decisions. At Revonic, we put data and insights at the core of our projects which enable us to make quantitative and qualitative decisions based on facts. The outcome of this approach leads to digital platforms with optimised user experience and higher conversions.
I hope this information gives you a base to kick off your data analytics on your eCommerce site to help drive better conversions. Together, we will see data-driven decisions impacting your eCommerce sales and overall digital performance.
 | Balderick Bissessur Data Analytics Consultant |
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