3 Ways to Increase Sales With Real-Time Analytics
Imagine you own a brick-and-mortar store. You can quickly gauge certain demographic information about each consumer who walks through your door that may help you sell to them. But what if you also had details about their past purchases, previous visits to your store and every other interaction with your brand on hand? Not after they make a purchase, leave your store and maybe never walk through its doors again. No, right then, while they're stilll engaged with your brand.
This is essentially what real-time web analytics will do for your online store. Here are three ways that access to real-time analytics can help drive your brand's sales:
1. Customer-centric decision making. The most important knowledge you can gain from your web analytics is a deep understanding of who your customers are — behaviorally, demographically, psychographically, etc. This insight is going to factor into every single business decision you make. Having this insight in real-time will enable you to make those decisions on the spot.
The type of customer data you want to pay attention to will vary from business to business depending on what your goals are. However, one universal rule is that it's imperative to track actions (not just page views) like adding a product to a cart, clicking a sign-up button or performing a product search. Tracking these actions gives you more meaningful insight into the behavioral profiles of your customers. You know what they're actually doing. If you're not tracking these actions with your analytics program, then you're missing out on an entire dimension of customer insight.
This behavioral data will enable you to segment and target your audience. While demographic segmentation is useful, you need to take a holistic approach to profiling your customers by also including their behavioral history and patterns. Knowing what a customer did in the past is one of the best ways to predict their future behavior. Knowing what she's doing right now is the best way to leverage all of that information.
2. Targeted live chat. Forty-five percent of shoppers say that online chat is one of the most important e-commerce customer service features to them and 36 percent of online shoppers want retailers to improve their availability of live customer service. With statistics like these, it's not surprising that e-tailers see an immediate lift in conversions once they implement live chat.
Live chat is like providing site visitors with a virtual sales associate. You can of course receive inbound chat requests, but to really be effective you should be proactive. Use your real-time analytics to identify visitors who would benefit from speaking to a representative and initiate a chat conversation.
For example, you can rescue hesitant visitors by using your real-time analytics to identify those who show signs (e.g., they're inactive for more than a few minutes on a page) of abandoning their carts. Initiate a chat request to answer any questions and relieve their concerns on the spot, before it's too late. Your representative can simultaneously use this conversation as an opportunity to upsell or provide additional product recommendations. This is how you convert website visitors into customers.
3. Personalized promotions. There's a reason mail-in rebates exist: they're marketers’ attempt at getting customers whom they have very little information about (e.g., someone who purchases a product in a brick-and-mortar store) to self-segment. Retailers assume those who really want a discount will go to the trouble of mailing in the rebate, while the rest won't bother putting forth the effort.
Thankfully, when it comes to your online store, your analytics will automatically give you the information you need about your customers to better segment and target promotions.
One quick and effective trick is to offer visitors who are hesitant about making a purchase an incentive to pull the trigger. For example, target shoppers who have over $300 of product in their cart with a free shipping promotion if they purchase within the next 10 minutes. A simple promotion like this can mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
Bonus: Measure campaigns instantly. The previous three tips will help you make more money; here's a bonus tip that will help you save money.
Real-time analytics will enable you to evaluate your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on the spot. That means if a campaign isn't leading to conversions, you can find out right away and stop or slow down the campaign before wasting additional PPC spend. Rather than having to wait an entire day to understand the effects of an ad tweak or test, you can watch your results as they happen and adjust with confidence on the fly.
The digital consumer moves quickly. You only have a few minutes of their attention at best. Real-time analytics ensures that you make that time count.
Elie Khoury is the CEO of Woopra, a San Francisco-based service that helps companies bring a smarter "in-store" experience online via customer-centric web analytics and engagement tools.
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