How to Gather Valuable Information about Your Customers to Increase eCommerce sales

Gathering data and information about your customers is essential for the success of your eCommerce store. It helps you to target your customers in a better and more efficient way. And there are certain ways and techniques you can employ to gather those valuable data and use them for your benefit. Read this article to know how you can do so with minimal efforts.

There is no such thing that promises the success of your eCommerce store without hard and smart work. Every business is unique and their struggles are different. So, the question arises in your mind is how to strategize your marketing effort to make sure that your time and resources do not go in vain? One way to answer this question is by gathering as much valuable data about your customers.

First, understanding and collecting information about your customers isn’t a complex thing as you would think it to be. But it surely requires some efforts from your side to find effective sources to collect meaningful data. There are so many tools and platforms out there for you to collect and analyze your customers’ data. But you have to define what data is more significant for you out of all the data you have gathered. And then break that data into an understandable format so that you can come up with effective solutions that work like a charm for your business.

Importance of Collecting Customer Data

The only thing standing between you and the success of your eCommerce business is the effective collection of customers’ data. Your collection of data consists of information like age, gender, wants and needs, geolocation, job designation, devices to log in, social channels, buying habits, what content they most engage with, and much more. All of these data are most valuable for the success of your eCommerce store. And all these data help you to come up with promotional strategies for business.

Also, regularly collecting and understanding data can help you to develop new tactics to work on non-effective areas. So that you can improve the outcomes of your business strategies. Using behavioral data of your consumers you can enhance their shopping experience. And also, you can improve the user-friendliness of your website.

What are the ways to gather customer information?

But all of these things are easier said than done. Fortunately, there are so many effective methods you can implement right away that can gather all the necessary data for you. Below we have come up with some of the most promising ways for you to gather all necessary customer data.

1. Use Web Analytics Tools to Monitor your Customers

The more information you have about your customers, it would be better for you to understand them. Web analytic tools are one such effective way to gather important data about your visitors and customers. Numerous online analytic tools will help you to track and analyze the behaviors of your visitors. You can also use free as well as paid tools that bring out more information. Doing this will give you an understanding of their buying habits and intents. The following are some of the ways you can track your customers’ real-time activity.

• Cookies: Cookies are one kind of data tracker that your website attaches to the web browser of your visitors. In some ways, cookies are advantageous for you and your visitors both. Through cookies, your visitors’ browser will remember them next time when they log in. Also, it helps websites to remember repeat customers.
  

  Also read : Ways to Turn The Festive Season Shoppers into Lifetime Faithful Customers

  It helps you to collect important data about your customers. These cookies keep track of user’s viewing activity, buying habits, website searches, and many more things. You can use these data to optimize your SEO performance and come up with content they spend the most time with.

• Traffic Analysis Tools: Traffic data plays the most essential part in the success of your promotional strategies. And there are tools like Google Analytics that tell you which content pages are most visited and the source of the customers. They can even track the geographical location, web browser, devices, and time of the day. Understanding these data gives you points, which you should mostly focus on to improve sales. By analyzing these data, you can personalize your website’s content and products that meet your customers’ requirements. These tools also tell you how many customers are returning customers. Return customers are those customers who are very interested in your products but can’t buy them for some reason. These analytic data help you to find those reasons and optimize your products page according to your customers’ needs. Or you can just offer them a deal to make a sale. And it doesn’t stop here, you can do a lot more things with these data from analytic tools.
• User Engagement Tools: You can implement tools like a heat map that lets you know the most engaged part of a page on your website. With the use of thermal imaging, these tools can highlight the most engaged part of a page in yellow, orange and red color and least engaged parts in green and blue color. It does by tracking the mouse activity of your customers. With this heat map tracker, you can collect visitors clicking, scrolling, and pausing habits on your website.

2. Social Media is Great source for Data Collection

More than 3.5 billion people around the globe use one or another social media network. And each of the social media networks tells you something special about your customers. Engaging with consumers on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram gives you incredibly valuable information about them. Each social media network offers its own analytics and insights that collect user data. But often those data are not accurate or fractured and confusing for you. So, if you want statistically accurate data, then you have to find a platform or tool that gives the aggregated data.

Also read : Social Listening, Interaction and Selling through Social Commerce

Social media networks do realize the importance of their user’s data. And they use it to target their users on behalf of businesses that participate in their ads program. But most of the users hate engaging with those ads.

So, spend a little time to analyze the data you have gathered through the social networks’ insight page or from the tool you have subscribed to. Those data often tell you about interested people and which gender and age group they belong to. Also, users’ interests, needs, wants, challenges, and many more data will help you strategize your future marketing plans.

3. Find the Source of Customers Referral

The referral source of your customers is the most important thing for your online business. Don’t make a mistake of ignoring this step when designing your eCommerce site. Because knowing the source of your customers can become a key element for the success of your store. It provides a great opportunity to market strategies that work very well and potentially helps you to generate new leads.

Read more : What is Customer Acquisition and it’s Process

With the help of Google Analytics, you can track the reference source. But in most cases, they are not that much accurate. To have an accurate referral data, you can add a field in your checkout page asking your customers their referral source. Once you have those data, you can put them in place to take maximum benefits out of it for your online business.

4. Surveys and Feedbacks are Great Way to Collect Data

Ask your customers to participate in surveys and give feedback to you directly. There are so many ways to implement a survey. You can either send an email, post on social media or post it on your website via popup. If you have their contact details, then you can directly call them to answer your survey questions. These surveys give you qualitative data in the form of feedback, complaints or reviews about your brand. This helps you to focus on what is great about your marketing efforts and improve what’s not great. So that you can improve your sales figures.

5. Comp Up with Loyalty Program

Many eCommerce stores have realized the potential loyalty programs hold. And that’s the reason they have come up with loyalty programs of their own. Other than winning the loyalty of your customers, you can gather all necessary and difficult-to-get data. Customers who want to join the loyalty program have to exchange their details for the right incentives you offer. Ask them necessary data for the right kind of incentive and they will be ready to give it to you without any hesitation.

Wrapping Up

Any data, whether qualitative or quantitative are the basic elements for the success of your promotional plans. These are some of the ways you can gather necessary data about your customers to make your future promotional plans according to their needs. With this data in hand, you will better understand the needs, and interests of your customers. So that you can use those data effectively when needs arise and have exceptional sales and conversion for your eCommerce store. If you are still confused about anything and want to have a clear understanding, then consult an eCommerce expert. He will guide you in the direction that will be most helpful for you and your business.