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The How & Why: Successful Data-Driven Marketing for eCommerce Stores

13 Jan 2022

Albert Wood

The How & Why: Successful Data-Driven Marketing for eCommerce Stores

Have you ever been startled by how specific some of the advertisements are as you scroll through the internet? You might be feeling like they know your desires better than you know them yourself.

Most of us have been there — tempted into visiting Amazon, Ebay or Shopify to purchase or subscribe to that thing that seems to be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

So how do these eCommerce shops do it?

Data-driven marketing is how; taking over the game in digital marketing strategies with the goal of targeting the perfect consumers for each desired product.

What is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing is the strategy of using data, or customer information (whether it be through email or through perusing the web), to design more effective digital marketing campaigns. Those ads of things you didn’t even realize you needed are all thanks to data-driven marketing strategies!

The process of how these strategies came about drove a need for more effective data management platforms. Think of how much information must be received, analyzed and applied as useful to you as a marketer.

Using trusted attribution modeling platforms, you can aggregate the data and build the foundations of your marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing for eCommerce Stores

The ever-evolving capabilities of the online consumer is proportional to the amount of available data. eCommerce is defined as any commercial transaction taking place over the internet.

Even with your own personal experiences as a consumer, eCommerce stores base their goals on the need for organization and strategic analytical methods.

Optimization for Marketers

With data-driven marketing being the most advanced and widely used tactic in digital programmatic purchasing, you are able to ensure you are spending your time and resources on the right media and data.

Use of attributable modeling platforms and their algorithmic analysis of consumer data lets you know what information can and cannot be used. This saves you from spending too much time and money on each campaign.

Besides budget and spending optimization, data-driven marketing also optimizes your efforts in making relevant and impactful content. Using one of the various attribution models, such as the unified marketing measurement (UMM), resolves one of the most commonly-faced challenges marketers undergo: Determining where and how your time and efforts will be best spent.

Increases Content and Copy Relevancy

A survey found that 50 percent of consumers would pay more for a product or service if the brands succeed in providing personally relevant content.

One study revealed that 74 percent of consumers feel frustrated when seeing irrelevant content and nearly 80 percent of them won’t even consider an offer unless it is branded to their personal desires.

These statistics are just a small portion of why data-driven markets are a vital asset to the digital marketing and eCommerce industry.

We all like to feel included and important as consumers ourselves in this online world. This is why tailoring each marketing tactic to the individual consumer is so important.

Improved Consumer Satisfaction

Gaining a better understanding of what your audience needs has been shown to directly increase the likelihood of product consumption by 10 percent.

Data-driven marketing techniques improve customer engagement by targeting each consumer for who they are as an individual, and in turn, customer satisfaction in brand perception.

Nearly 80 percent of consumers claim that content that appeals to their desires and interests drastically increases their purchase intent.

Engaging consumers in a personalized shopping experience leaves you with five to eight times the ROI on your market spending. In other words, data-driven marketing efforts increase consumer satisfaction, and in turn, increase sales.

Developing Best Practices for Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

Success in data-driven marketing begins with an overall plan or strategy. You want to allot the most efficient use of time, resources and overall marketing effort to attract and involve the right consumers to the right products.

Here are some of the best strategies for data-driven marketing for the eCommerce industry…

1) Ensuring the Data

Success in your data-driven marketing efforts first and foremost relies on the accuracy of the data you are collecting.

With the vast amount of data available on the internet, you must understand what data is relevant to include about your consumers. Think of who you are trying to target. What consumer audience will be the best target for this campaign, and why?

Getting to know your audience will aid in depicting who these targets will be and in turn, allow you to research and reflect on what their ideal consumption behaviors are. Once you know the consumers, you will be able to trust that the data you are collecting is relevant.

Keep reading for tools that can help you in generating consumer profiles.

2) Managing That Data

With the ever-evolving world of e-commercialism and data-driven marketing, high-quality collection and management is imperative to the success of your marketing efforts. This not only helps you understand your customer base more, but also allows for the creation of new marketing and lead acquisition opportunities.

Again, there will be a few helpful tools to help you manage your data across your marketing team.

You have to be compliant with the data you do collect, as there are many organizations out there with malicious intent in leveraging consumer data.

3) Segmenting the Data

Even those closest to you share very different desires and needs.

Similarly, not everyone in your target audience will be the same.

This is why you have to treat those in your target market with this in mind as you develop and tailor your marketing tactics.

There are endless ways to segment the consumer data and audience. Just think about the basic ways that we all stand apart from everyone else around us!

There are different demographics (age, gender and location) and psychographics. That leads to different goals and pain points across the board.

Segmentation is particularly helpful in email and social media marketing. This is also a good step to take when retargeting your audience – which we will talk about later on.

4) Analyzing Marketing Performance

There is always room for improvement in everything you do.

Reflection on your past efforts and performance is an important step in your journey to marketing success, especially when it comes to something as quick in development as data-driven marketing.

Reflecting on the right questions is important in understanding where to go next.

Did you target the right consumers? What worked and what didn’t? What changes can you make with your data-driven marketing strategies to overcome any obstacles and reach your customers better?

Break each step and process down if you need to. The deeper you probe and the more questions you ask, the more you will be able to improve. In return, your improved strategies will let you prosper.

5) Retargeting Prospects and Customers

Have you ever had to be reminded of things more than once? Marketing to and targeting your audience is no exception here.

Retargeting is a critical strategy for ALL marketers and their efforts, especially that of cross-channel marketers. It lets you give your brand top-of-mind awareness among the right audience.

You don’t want your ideal buyers to forget all your brand has to offer after interacting with it just once. This is why successful retargeting efforts are so important to help your brand grow!

Data-analytics will allow you to see what about your brand attracted these consumers to begin with, thus allowing you to bring up those aspects to those same consumers once again.

Below are some tools to help guide you through retargeting your audience…

Helpful Tools for Successful Data-Driven Marketing

Let’s start with targeting the right customers! Take a look at generating customizable and professional persona generations using the free Make My Persona generator. This will allow you to find the right target audience and feel confident about collecting the right data.

Wondering where to even begin with data-driven analytics? Marketing Hub is a helpful tool for any business looking to drive their marketing efforts using the right data. In connection with Hubspot CRM, it allows you to track, analyze and deploy consumer data all from one place.

A helpful tool in data-driven consumer segmentation is a customer data platform (CDP). This aggregates customer data into profiles so you can distinguish your target audiences further.

‘Beginner’s Guide to Retargeting’ to learn how leads and awareness can help you succeed in your retargeting campaigns.

Let Data Drive Your Market

Consumer data has evolved generalized, broadcast-based marketing into the personalized and prosperous marketing style that data-driven marketing has become. With the help of attribution modeling and other data-analyzing platforms, marketers are now able to use data to design more effective digital and eCommerce marketing campaigns.

This methodology allows for optimization of your budget and efforts, ability to specify content and consumer audiences and overall increase customer satisfaction.

Albert Wood

Albert Wood is a technology futurist, sales stimuli, motivator, and E-commerce specialist at ioVista. As a data-driven and digital marketing evangelist, Albert’s passion is transforming struggling e-commerce businesses into sales-generating powerhouses through the right combination of UX and digital marketing strategies.