The amount of information in the world doubles every two years.
The Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printers, computer vision, wearables… are spreading through our society without us realizing how much information is being recorded.
Processing all this data allows greater precision in fields like medicine, language translation and even smart cars. In the future, Big Data’s possibilities will be limitless, potentially saving lives or predicting natural disasters.
Big data holds a lot of information that can be extracted in many ways, which can frustrate small businesses with fewer resources to extract and analyze data.
How can it help your business?
According to a recent Forrester study, 63% of users prefer to buy from a store where customer service and after-sales care are a priority.
Big data is how you study and understand your customers, learn their needs and respond to them quickly.
Knowing and understanding your customers is key to increasing sales and growing your business. Studying your customers’ demographics, behavior and spending (lifetime value) can help you understand their buying habits.
With all this information, including purchase history, you can identify your most frequent buyers. This lets you be proactive and send personalized emails to these customers, thanking them for trusting your store and offering a personalized coupon. (Tools like LogiCommerce let you create personalized coupons for each customer).
Amazon is one of the big companies using all the data it collects to improve customer experience. Amazon stores user information such as address and purchase history. It uses it not only to know which products you might be interested in, but also to get to know you and later study buying trends by age, location…
In the age of big data, you don’t need to imagine; you simply test and observe. Instead of dreaming up big ideas and testing them for real, today you can test them in a virtual market built in the real world with real data. If the project doesn’t take off, all you’ve lost is bits & bytes.
Tools such as web analytics make it possible to implement strategies to better understand and retain customers, cut operating costs and evolve services and products.
Big data and eCommerce
One of the applications that works best in eCommerce is email marketing.
Unlike direct emails sent to your whole contact list, which will be irrelevant to most of your customers, big data lets you segment users into groups, each receiving a personalized email, considerably increasing the chances of success.
Segmented emails include: abandoned carts, frequent customers by spend or volume, new customers, those who haven’t bought in the last 90 days…
The well-known 80/20 marketing rule may become history with big data. The rule holds that 80% of profit comes from focusing only on the 20% of customers with the most potential. Today, thanks to all the information gathered through customer management software, you can reach 100% of your customers, increasing your bottom line.
Improving your marketing with big data won’t happen overnight, but if you’re patient and know how to use the stored data, you can grow your business’s sales in the future.
Big data can help you improve the user’s shopping experience by answering questions like these:
- How many users live near the physical store but buy online instead of in store?
- Of all the discounts and promotions offered, which were the most successful?
- Which keywords are used in searches for your products? Which keywords should I add to my products?
- How do users interact with your business on social media? What percentage of “shares” have your products had? Which ads performed best?
- Have the related products shown on a product page delivered results? Has the user also bought products the eCommerce site suggested?
These are some of the questions you’re probably asking yourself, and their answers could change your business’s direction. The answers are all in big data; the key now is how to extract that information.
In short, Big Data isn’t just about handling the huge amounts of data the internet provides; it’s a turning point for improving your eCommerce interface, enhancing the shopping experience and outpacing the competition.
