It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been an eCommerce marketer for months or years. The truth is that all marketing strategies have room for improvement. The most profitable eCommerce retailers didn’t reach the top by ignoring their data. Rather, they used it to maximize their ROI and achieve long-term success.
Are you ready to get more out of your marketing data? Here is how you can build an effective marketing plan that is fueled by your data.
Set Your Goals and Metrics
To lay the groundwork for a data-driven marketing plan, you need to establish which key metrics you will use to track your marketing performance. There are some metrics which are universally tracked by all eCommerce businesses, but they may vary depending on your industry.
Some essential metrics for online businesses include conversion rate, bounce rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, web traffic, customer acquisition cost, average order value, customer lifetime value, and overall return-on-investment.
These metrics will also vary depending on the type of marketing strategy you use. For instance, your essential email marketing metrics will differ from how you gauge your social media channels.
Select the Right Digital Marketing Tools
Your eCommerce business probably has big goals, and you can certainly achieve them with the right tools and technology. A data-driven marketing plan simply can’t exist without the help of robust digital tools.
It can be confusing to identify the right resources, especially if you are new to the online market. Whether you want to use multiple tools to get the job done or track your marketing efforts on a single dashboard, just be sure to do your research to find the right ones to satisfy your business goals.
Invest in Your Top-Performing Channels
One of the biggest mistakes that online retailers can make is throwing too much money into marketing channels that don’t work. If you aren’t paying attention to your marketing data, then how else will you know which marketing channels are most effective?
If you have an automated marketing platform like Springbot, then you can easily see which marketing channels give you the best ROI right in your dashboard. With this information, you can plan to invest more into these channels for your future marketing campaigns.
Use Your Data to Predict the Future
A quick disclaimer—you can’t actually predict the future by digging deep into your data. However, you can use it to see trends and patterns that will help you take your eCommerce store in the right direction.
For example, you might look at your data and notice that the majority of your conversions now occur on mobile devices. That would indicate that you should focus more of your marketing efforts on optimizing for mobile and improving the mobile experience for your customers.
Leverage Your Competitor’s Data
Data-driven marketers look beyond their eCommerce store’s data and leverage their competitors’ data as well. Why go to the trouble? Believe it or not, your competitors can provide you with valuable insight that will help you stay one step ahead of them.
By performing a competitive analysis, you can identify weak spots in your competitors’ strategies and use this to boost your own marketing campaigns. Or, you could notice what they’re doing right in their campaigns and adopt these strategies for yourself.
At the very least, your competitors can provide you with an industry benchmark that can help you see the bigger picture. With Springbot’s free eCommerce scorecard, you can instantly see how you stack up against your industry peers.
Test, Analyze, and Optimize
Your marketing plan isn’t complete until you have a way to test your marketing efforts and analyze the results. Split testing is one of the easiest and most common testing methods that eCommerce marketers use.
Also known as A/B testing, split testing allows marketers to test two different variables of their eCommerce site. For instance, you could test two separate call-to-action buttons to see which drives more clicks.
For more details, Shopify has an excellent beginner’s guide to split testing that will guide you through the basics. This will help you test and optimize different aspects of your marketing plan to improve their overall efficiency.
Conclusion
Taking a data-driven approach to your marketing plan reduces a significant amount of the guesswork. Making decisions based on your data means happier customers, better ROI and a healthy future for your eCommerce store.
