Research studies show that businesses are spending about 95% of their budget on bringing visitors to their website yet demonstrate a low percentage of success to convert these visitors into customers. And additionally, 80% of online retailers do not use their analytics data effectively. Typically, poorly optimized site pages will drive away visitors and hence a large chunk of that money invested in lead generation would be wasted. Here are methods to use analytics data to improve eCommerce conversion rates and increase transaction opportunities.
Personalized shopping experience: Customers often demonstrate more opportunities to purchase products if they receive personalized shopping experience with dynamic pages. With analytics tracking, you can collect useful metrics data about browsing, searches and purchasing behavior about site visitors and then compare with performance metrics for each product/category. You can also combine product data with customer data to generate trends for better product recommendations for new visitors.
Fix shopping cart abandonment: Spikes in amount of customers lost during the check-out process for online business store is a major concern. You can track the valuable analytics data collected to review the transactions/drop-outs data within shopping cart pages involved and review the eCommerce conversion funnel data.
Here are effective ways to fix shopping cart abandonment:
- Collect information about prospect customer and following up by email
- Tighten the checkout process so that each step is concise with clear progress indicators.
- Optimize the specific step in checkout process that is causing loss in transactions.
Optimize your site for mobile: With the steady upsurge in smartphone and tablet usage across the world, business websites that are not optimized for these devices have shown a tendency to suffer from lower conversion rates than sites that are optimized. Additionally, two out of three customers prefer accessing a mobile website than a mobile application. Hence, based on the analytics data collected for devices used across specific landing pages, you can optimize the site pages for mobile.
Targeted promotions: For sites that are running promotions, you can track referring URLs used by visitor to come to your site, review demographics data, location, behavior, visit pattern and technology used. You can review this useful analytics data to offer targeted promotions.
Landing pages opportunity analysis: Periodically, conduct missed opportunity analysis for different landing pages on your site across specific date range. You can calculate the missing opportunity value as [(1-conversion rate) * Revenue per visitor]. Hence if you converted everyone else that did not convert at the same revenue per visitor will be referred as missed opportunity. With this, we can track the top landing pages on your website that could be optimized better.
Email marketing campaign: eCommerce emails and newsletters act as authoritative call-to-action for prospect customers. The open-rate and click-through-rate can be improved by analyzing useful analytics data about the behavioral patterns of your visitors (past visit trends, purchase history, product searches). And then use this data to send personalized emails to prospect customers with promotions and call-to-actions.
Further Reading
Getting a Testing Program Off the Ground: Optimization Part 2
3 Key Analytics Questions for 2015: Governance, Big Data and Customer Journeys
Advanced Analytics and Marketing Optimization – 2 Sides of the Same Coin
