Have you ever wondered how to quickly get the stats on your business’s retention, purchasing behavior, and lifetime value on a daily ongoing basis? Are you itching to grow your business and increase revenue but don’t know where to start? 

The answer is in the data, with the help of data analytics tools.‍

Ecommerce shops use data analytics tools to track and analyze data related to customer purchasing patterns that can impact decisions up and down the sales funnel and beyond.  ‍

What are Data Analytics tools?

Data analytics is a robust platform that allows business owners, product managers, marketers, or any data-driven individual to determine their most profitable users, if products are meeting their customer needs and how to retain more customers.

Companies use product analytics to deeply examine their product offerings and customers to:

• Find opportunities for growth, such as creating email campaigns at a specific segment of users to remind them to rebuy or to offer them another product to buy
• Analyze their marketing spend in relation to its performance
• Correlate customer purchasing with lifetime value
• Understand their fulfillment needs and most popular products at different purchasing intervals

Plus so much more.

This valuable data can guide decisions big and small to increase profits and the effectiveness of endeavors like advertising, fulfillment, marketing campaigns, etc. ‍

Four Reasons You Should Start Using Data Analysis Tools Now

McKinsey reports that 50% of successful digital leaders collect and analyze customer data regularly. Only 16% of lower-performing companies collect and use this data. The research firm has also discovered that companies that engage in customer analytics bring in double the profits of competitors that skip this process. Data analytics isn’t just for strategy teams or freelance consultants to provide - all business leaders even creative branding teams should have a pulse on their business’s revenue activity and customer purchasing patterns if they want to drive growth. 

Let’s take a closer look at what you can do with data-driven ecommerce analysis.‍

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1. Understand Consumer Purchasing Patterns  ‍

Studying the data allows you to answer critical questions about what is driving consumer decisions and behaviors:

• What products have the best customer retention?
• How many customers are return buyers?  - What is their repurchase rate for 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x for a specific product?
• Which products are leading to the biggest up-sell opportunities?
• What products contribute to a higher purchasing frequency?
  

Data analytics tools can help you discover answers to these questions. It’s essential to choose a robust tool that all your team members can access and understand and not have to spend hours in trainings to learn how to build out reporting and put together.

Some tools are powerful but so complicated that some stakeholders may be left behind. The best data analytics  insight tools are the ones your organization can actually use and don’t require formal trainings, on-boardings, and an in house expert. One that all can access and use with ease is the key for teams to get the knowledge from the data so they can move on and make decisions.  ‍

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2. Improve Marketing Performance

Data analytics can help your company improve your products’ performance in the ad marketplace. Teams spend a lot of money, blindly, to drive customers to their product. A lot of money can just disappear if there isn’t any strategy behind what works and what drives more revenue. Marketing performance data allows organizations to take a proactive marketing approach versus a reactive one that relies solely on past product success. With data analytics, you can discover:

• Which marketing channels are driving in the highest number of leads?
• What campaigns lead to the best and most loyal customers?
• Which marketing channels are the most profitable?
• Which marketing techniques are leading to conversions?

On the flip side, product analytics also gives you information about what isn’t working. Using a tool that gives you real-time input can be incredibly helpful for ecommerce and marketing teams. If the information points to techniques that aren’t succeeding, that knowledge can empower you to turn the ship around midstream.

Segmentation data is an essential component for understanding marketing performance and performance of your business. Choose a robust data analysis tools that allow you to segment data across factors like:

• GeographyProducts
• Campaigns
• Use of discount codes
• Email campaign effectiveness among different segments
• Channel effectiveness in acquiring customers

An in-depth analysis of segmentation data can supercharge your marketing efforts.

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3. Optimize and Cut Costs

Data analytics allows you to take a big-picture view of your ecommerce venture to identify ways to optimize your effectiveness in running a lean business Finding answers to high-level questions focused on efficiency and value can help you save on overall costs:

• How much does it cost to acquire customers across different channels?
• Which customer segments include customers with the highest customer lifetime value (CLV)?
• What is the LTV by Channel?
• How much a customer is worth over time - 3 month, 4 month, 6 month, 12 month, etc?
• What is the revenue, orders, by product variants so I can plan my fulfillment schedule more effectively? 
  

Data analytics leads to better financial decision-making across the board. This insight helps you streamline buying processes and develop targeted campaigns that drive revenue from your most valuable customers. ‍

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4. Forecast Trends

You can use customer analytics to discover upcoming trends by transforming historical data into predictions for the future. This strategic insight can give you a sharp edge over competitors. Data analytics helps companies answer questions about future customer behavior:

• What do we think the retention trend will be for various customer cohorts based upon historical performance?
• Are we stocking enough or too much of specific products?
• What do we think Sales will look like next month?
  

Data analytics tools that include predictive analytics features can automate much of the prediction process. Manually compiling historical data and then building analysis around it is time-consuming, and automation gives you a significant advantage. ‍

Harness The Power Hiding In Your Data

An investment in data analytics capabilities can yield impressive, revenue-impacting results, often from data you’re already collecting. As you select the mix of tools that will deliver results, remember, the best tools are the ones your team can understand and fully operate.

Here at Peel, we focus on tools that automate business analytics, including Shopify Analytics. Our tool is straightforward to use and easy to set up and we deliver rich and actionable discoveries about customer behaviors to help organizations keep a pulse on their business and find revenue opportunities without having to run analysis across over 35 metrics and hundreds of segments. Peel delivers the the key insights and trends that empower you to make better decisions for your business.