5 Data Trends in Ecommerce every Marketer should Know

Do you want to understand why leveraging data for all aspects of your ecommerce business is critical? Read on to find out how backed data trends can benefit the bottom line of your ecommerce business.

The term “data-driven marketing” has been used a great deal in the context of advertising campaigns in the past decade. 

The quantum of data generated and consumed on any given day is staggering. As per a 2021 survey, it was 59 petabytes of data a day. With this sizable goldmine of data out there, businesses need to know how and why navigating this data is critical to their marketing campaigns and overall growth.

Exploring Data as a Critical Aspect in Ecommerce

62.4%.

That’s the percentage of user penetration in the ecommerce space that has been forecasted for the year 2025.

That would mean that out of every 10 people, at least 6 would be online consumers. Each user can create over 1.7MB of data per second. Putting all these figures together, it is undeniable that there is an unfathomable amount of data for your business to analyze and synthesize.

The more information you collect on your customer base, the more likely you are to understand them, engage with them, and target them in ways that they find relevant, thus incentivizing them to convert.

Comprehensive and unified data is the cornerstone of good marketing in 2022 and beyond.

Honing in on Data Trends in Ecommerce

Here are five trends in data that ecommerce brands can leverage for better marketing, customer acquisition, and retention:

Trend 1: Achieve enhanced analytics

Ecommerce businesses have multitudes of data at hand. They are uniquely positioned to leverage unified analytics for ecommerce. What this means is that they need a platform that allows them to centralize the data across your entire tech stack - and deliver customized data sets for each team’s unique needs. Unified analytics for ecommerce allows businesses to account for all the data points in a modern ecommerce stack, from customer interactions and orders to inventory and supply chain.

An example of this is a unified platform that centralizes data for marketing (with live customer data and real time audiences), leadership (with a single source of truth built from data from across the organization, and operations (with simple visualizations about inventory and order fulfillment).

Forecasting your supply to the closest possible degree is more manageable with data at hand. Analytics helps you optimize your supply chain to always keep up with demand without having to inflate costs with too much residual inventory.

Another layer of analysis that data unlocks for ecommerce businesses is in campaign measurement. Right from knowing how much time a customer spends on your website to tracking how many customers have saved your giveaway post on social media – ecommerce has a tremendous amount of data on the purchase journey of each customer. This data, when leveraged in real time, can help you optimize your campaigns and your ad spend.

Trend 2: Build a single customer view

Modern marketing tools – like the Customer Data Platform (CDP) - can help ecommerce businesses synthesize customer data at a granular level. This means that you can not only process as many consumer profiles as possible but be able to gain deeper insights about each profile.

With the right data partner and tools, you can gauge your customer’s emotional responses to your marketing campaigns and products. You also have insights into their purchase patterns to understand when would be the right time to target or retarget them.

With ecommerce customer data, you have a holistic, 360-degree view of your shopper. This includes insights like what they want and need, what kind of language they respond to, where you can target them beyond traditional channels, among many others.

Trend 3: Unlock omnichannel marketing automation

When you think about all the stages in your marketing funnel, there are only a few steps that cannot be automated. And this includes automated data collection.

From data collection to behavior tracking and lead generation through automated communication are the new pillars of a data-driven marketing campaign.

Every email or SMS that you send out as a response to a touchpoint being triggered by a potential customer is an opportunity for you to maximize your returns by enhancing their purchase journey. For example, when they click on “subscribe to the newsletter” or “receive updates” or leave their cart abandoned, your new-age marketing tools like the CDP can trigger an automated action that further engages the shopper in their purchase journey. 

Automated communication is your best bet because you can target your customers at a precise moment when their interest has been piqued sufficiently.

This interest can be sustained beyond the initial trigger-based communication through a steady flow of emails or texts containing offers, valuable information and knowledge, incentives, and other hyper-personalized content.

Trend 4: Engage in precision-targeted advertising

Customer data empowers ecommerce brands with precision retargeting and lookalike audiences. What this means is that ecommerce businesses now don’t just have all the insights they need to understand the purchase triggers and barriers of every single customer. They have a way to predict each customer’s buying journey and purchase needs by deep diving into the attributes of other customers that look like them or share the same attributes.

Data-based audience segmentation and building lookalike audience segments will help you shape the narrative for different segments of customers to maximize the probability of conversions.

You should be able to refine your targeting strategies to such an extent that your customer feels that you are a relatable, valuable, and trustworthy source of information (and not just spam content and sales fluff). And that will differentiate you from your competitors.

Trend 5: Build a hyper-personalized customer experience

The kind of content or products that Customer A sees on your ecommerce storefront or in your communication with them should not be 100% identical to what Customer B sees. 

All ecommerce brands know this but often fail to provide that level of personalization.

You need to be able to answer “what would this customer want to see the moment they open our website?” to increase your chances of conversion, and that’s what comprehensive and unified data can help you do.

The shopping experience, right from the email that got them to click on your website URL to the discount codes that encouraged them to buy when they usually wouldn’t as well as the products they see on your storefront should all be consistent and tailored towards that specific customer’s needs and preferences.

This degree of hyper-personalization in the customer’s purchase journey comes from knowing your customers better, the foundation for which is data.

How do I hop on these trends?

Well, the simple answer is to tap into all the first-party data you are collecting and engage in consistent data enrichment. But the current tools in the market don’t do justice to the sheer potential of data in ecommerce.

There is a far more efficient way of going about this and leveraging every single ecommerce trends to enhance your business bottom-line and customer experience. 

To find out what that is, sign up for early accessto Moda’s latest offering that is designed to help ecommerce customers make the most out of their data. Sign up, you don’t want to miss this!