Create Data-Driven Strategy for eCommerce in 2023

Updated on November 14, 2022 in Ecommerce by Nishant Shrimali

Let’s start this article with an example of a Data-driven strategy for eCommerce. In a recent study of Digital Commerce 360, it was found that the major reason a customer prefers online purchase is the lower price, followed by other reasons such as free shipping, speed of delivery, and the wide range of products.

According to the same data, offering free delivery is a great idea to increase your conversion rate.

And this is what a Data-Driven strategy for eCommerce looks like.

Data is fairly a collection of information until you use it for a specific reason. In the following article, we are going to learn about

• What is a Data-Driven Strategy?
• Why is the Data-Driven Strategy so important?
• Benefits of data-driven strategy for eCommerce
• How to create a data-driven strategy for eCommerce?
• Tips to improve your eCommerce strategy to grow your eCommerce 

What is a Data-Driven Strategy?

Data is a collection of information from a reliable source about your audience, customer, and trends in the market. When you create a strategy, based on the following information in order to achieve your business goals, that strategy is known as Data-Driven Strategy for eCommerce.

For any eCommerce, it is the most reliable method to achieve the goals as the data fairly helps you to predict the outcome and get the most out of your sales and marketing efforts.

Why is the Data-Driven Strategy so Important?

In order to grow your eCommerce, you need to know more about your customer. No matter how much you already do, the process of understanding your customer could never end.

Data-Driven Strategy for eCommerce, actually helps you to have a window view about your customer’s likes-dislikes, trends, preferences, and fairly more than just the demographic of who your customer is.

When you understand your customer’s demands, you can fairly understand what they are looking for in your product and services. Now, if you could provide what they are looking for, an increase in sales would be just another benefit out of the many.

Benefits of Data-Driven Strategies

We know what data-driven strategy for eCommerce is, and why it is important in today’s world. Now before we jump on to creating your strategy, let us have a final look at the benefits of the Data-Driven approach for eCommerce.

Finds you your Audience

The most important benefit of a data-driven strategy for eCommerce is the fact that it helps you find your targeted audience. Often for an eCommerce, it becomes really difficult to figure out who their target audience is.

Whereas data-driven eCommerce knows exactly who would be interested in their products, what factors would affect the buying decision, and how they can reach out to their customer in an organic way.

Helps you in Decision Making

Often bad decisions are based on the lack of information. Hence if you are a data-driven eCommerce, the probability of making the right decision also increases. Rather than the usual trial and error method, data-driven strategies for eCommerce would help you make decisions based on the trends, and information available from the globe and your target audience.

Drive your team efforts

If you are working with a team, the most important step is to bind their efforts and drive them towards a common goal. Sharing the present data and creating a strategy based on it, helps your team to know what the goals are and what steps need to be taken. Hence with this, your team efforts are placed in the right place which helps you to grow your sales.

Improves Customer Experience

As said above, data helps you to know who your customer is in a much better way. Now that you are aware so much about them, you know what their likes and dislikes are. Hence improving the customer experience becomes an easy breeze.

Improves Cross-selling and Up-selling

Just like customer experience, cross-selling and up-selling are two very important factors to grow your sales. But the effectiveness of these selling strategies depends on how well you understood your customer. If you are showing the wrong products the chances of improving the sales decreases, and so does the customer experience.

Hence having a readable data-driven strategy for eCommerce is very important. Moreover, here is the best way to create your very own eCommerce strategy.

How to Create a Data-Driven Strategy for eCommerce?

Have a Goal

The very first step that you must follow is to have a goal. What is the purpose of your data-driven eCommerce strategy and all the marketing strategies that you are going to plan?

Is to drive sales, increase traffic, build loyalty, increase returning customers, etc. All though all these goals must be achieved over time, make sure you focus on them one by one.

Collect and Centralize your Data

The most important step in creating a data-driven eCommerce strategy would be the collection of the data. To start with, make sure that the data that you collect is from a reliable source.

The last thing you want would be to put your efforts in a false direction. Hence make sure that you are sourcing your data from niche data collection sites. Some of the best static sites are Statista, eMarketer, Google Scholar, and Google Trends.

Once you have collected the required data, it’s time to centralize it in one particular place. It would help you to have a better perspective of the market and who your customer is.

Create your Buyer’s Persona

The very first step after the collection and centralization of the data would be to create your buyer’s persona. Buyer’s persona is imaginative, but a factual representation of your ideal customer.

For the best output, we highly recommend you to create at least more than 3 buyers’ personas. Add every single detail about them that your ideal customer might have, and rely on actual facts more than just imaginative figures.

In addition, if you want to learn to create your customer’s buyer persona, we highly recommend you to check out the recent article – Buyer Personas for eCommerce Boost – 5 Best Ways & 9 Top Secrets

Select Your Sales-channels

Through the above steps, we know who your customer is, what he/she likes and where they spend most of their time. In addition, through the data you collect, you would know what are the higher converting sales channels to grow your sales.

Hence now, with the right buyer person and their sales channel, you would be easily able to determine your customer gate through.

Use the information to create your sales funnel for different persona and sales channels, to ensure minimum leakage and better conversions.

Market the Benefits for your buyer’s Persona

As said, again and again, the data that you collected shall be more than just the demographics. Additional information about your customer includes their financial positions, the importance of your product in their lives, and the pain points that your product and services can resolve.

Knowing all this would make your data-driven strategy for eCommerce much more successful. Moreover, it would come really helpful in your marketing strategy.

Perform Your Customer Segmentation

With all the marketing efforts and sales funnel, till now you would have successfully managed to attract new customers. But your work isn’t over yet. Now that you have made a customer and collected your customer information, it’s time for customer segmentation and bringing in personalization.

Personalization and data-driven marketing strategy allow you to show your customer that they are important to you. Ultimately, it builds long-term trust and brand loyalty within your customers. All this also helps to stay connected and re-sell your products to grow your sales from time to time to keep your eCommerce sustainable.

Reanalyze and Update

The last and final step here would be to reanalyze your progress and update your eCommerce strategy. You need to remember that the data-driven strategy, if only effective if this is reliable as well as relevant in the present time.

With time your customer changes and so should your marketing strategy. Hence, when analyzing, check out what works for you the best and how you can enhance it. At the same time, what are the new trends that you can follow to keep your customer interested in your product?

Tips to Improve your eCommerce Strategy to grow your sales

While we might be in the end to discuss how you can create a data-driven strategy for eCommerce, we would like to suggest to you some of the finest tips.

• Understand the customer journey from the beginning and remove any additional, unrequired steps from it. Follow a golden rule of customer experience, which is allowing your customer to reach their desired page (or any page on site) in 4 clicks or less.
• Optimize for a mobile-first eCommerce approach and maintain your desktop site. In a recent study, mobile commerce will share 72.9% of the total eCommerce sales.
• Consider providing free shipping and highlight as it has been a key factor in deciding the purchase pivot of a customer’s journey.
• Identify your USP and promote it within your marketing strategy to make people aware of why to choose you.

You may also read one of our best articles where we discussed how Developing your USP is the best eCommerce strategy.