Data is key to making great decisions in e-commerce. If you have the right information, you can make the right choices for both you and your customers.
That means it’s critical to collect the right data about your website visitors. Knowing what data to collect and how to use it, is the key to growing your e-commerce business and giving customers the best experience possible.
In this article, we’ll tell you exactly what information about your website visitors you should look for, so you feel empowered to make decisions, effortlessly.
Let’s get into it!
#1 How website visitors are spending time on your website
Learn more about how your website visitors experience your site by mapping their time. This way you’ll know exactly how they use your site from when they scroll, how much time they spend on each page, and how they use their cursor.
You can do this by installing a tracking code on your website and carefully analyze the results to understand user psychology.
Why is this of value?
Knowing which sections of your website visitors are spending the most time on will help you pinpoint what to amplify about your site and what to eliminate. You’ll be able to make the following decisions:
- Modify your user experience to make it visually appealing to visitors.
- Create content that website visitors genuinely enjoy reading.
- Add products to your e-commerce website that sell and eliminate those that don’t.
- Analyze bounce rates and be able to control them.
You can use A/B testing and heatmap tools to collect this sort of information. Most tools like Crazy Egg will give you a free 30-day trial, so you can get started in no time!
#2 Conversion actions
Being an e-commerce business, one of the essential website visitor metrics for you to track are conversion rates. Running an e-commerce business is like running a retail store, if you’re not converting visitors into subscribers or customers, you’re wasting your time!
You need to define what ‘conversion’ means to your business. We suggest that you use the following website events as conversions:
- Email Subscriber Rates: All website visitors who sign up for receiving your email newsletters should be monitored and managed. You need to collect information about who’s subscribing to your newsletters, how many website visitors are becoming subscribers, and why they are your subscribers. Accumulating this information can be a compelling way of building an online community whose needs your website caters to.
- Website Sales: Collecting information on your sales figures: who’s buying, when they’re buying and why they’re buying, or why they’re not buying can be a great catalyst for growing sales.
- Inquiry Form Submissions: Another metric you should track very closely is your inquiry form submissions. It’s the most direct and easy way of collecting information from your users. Create information fields that will be of value to you, and make them mandatory, so customers leave the information you need.
#3: What your website visitor don’t like
Elon Musk says: “As an entrepreneur, you must constantly seek criticism because a well thought through critique is worth gold.” And we concur! We believe you should actively seek feedback from your website visitors so you can know what needs improvement.
If you’re wondering how you can collect valuable user feedback, there are a variety of ways you can do it, such as:
- Website Visitor Feedback Forms: Websites that are seriously interested in feedback let users leave ratings or written submissions. You can have a rating form for visitors to submit or collect it through social media channels.
- Online Focus Groups or Webinars: You can invite website visitors or existing customers to join a webinar or online focus session where you can ask questions to seek feedback. You’ll be able to interact with your audience actively and know what they really think about you.
#4: Any information that helps you personalize the shopping experience
All information is important, so if you can collect it and your customers are comfortable submitting it, make sure you’re doing so. Any details about your visitors can help you personalize your site’s shopping experience even more.
This is more than just collecting visitors names to personalize emails; this is collecting shopping habits, browsed items, traffic source, and more so that you can build holistic visitor profiles.
You can use tools like Bronto, a highly sophisticated e-commerce marketing automation platform that integrates perfectly with e-commerce platforms like Magento, to create personalized email campaigns to reduce shopping cart abandonment and boost customer retention.
A great way to delight customers and send them personalized rewards or benefits for sharing information with you are birthday gifts. This can be a gift you send to them or a deeper discount than usual during their birthday month; the options are endless!
#5: Website visitor demographic data
Most data analytics software tools, like Google Analytics, will give you deep insights into customer demographic data, like their location, age, gender, etc. Analyzing this information will help you create more in-depth visitor personas, so you can understand the problems they’re trying to solve.
An excellent tool for getting granular with customer demographic data is called TowerData. It helps you validate the email addresses you collect through your website and then gives you detailed insights through finding links between the visitor’s email address and their social profiles online.
With in-depth demographic data, you’ll be able to segment your customers more granularly, ultimately optimizing your ROI from all marketing campaigns. For instance, if you’re a fashion company, you could segment shoppers as interested in male or female apparel. Then combine that with advanced geographic data to segment email content based on the subscriber’s local weather trends.
Wrap it up
Winning the data game isn’t just about collecting data, it’s about knowing what data you should look for and then using it in a way that creates a win-win situation for both you and your customers. Be smart, and almost ‘statistical’ about how you use your data to grow your business intelligently. Interested in learning more, reach out to Elevation Marketing here.
