Data Is Everywhere – But Here’s Why It's Important  

“Imagine you’ve built a supercar. You’ve got a great engine, you’ve put great effort into R&D, you know the product market fit is amazing and you’ve got a great driver. However, while you were driving, night fell, and you realized your car’s headlights didn’t work. Your car is worth a million dollars, but the headlights were only worth a fraction of that. But guess what? If you can’t turn on your headlights, you need to either slow down or wait for daylight. In my perspective, data is that headlight for an e-commerce brand.”
- Mohit Malik, Director – D2C (Digital Business) at Heads Up For Tails

Data helps marketers peek into the future and mitigate any foreseeable threats, therefore it comes in handy with the growth of your brand. With carefully leveraged data, an e-commerce brand can attract customers into the ecosystem. This helps with upselling, cross selling and increasing frequency of purchase. However, to achieve this, it is important to understand your customer data and understand the right time to market your products to your audience. Without data, it's impossible to know how customers are engaging with your products, what they want from you and what changes you can make to improve performance.  

Live, Breathe and Be Your Data – Just Remember to Avoid Any Traps

“Data will tell you that people are not buying, but why they aren’t buying is what we need to uncover.”
- Mohit Malik, Director – D2C (Digital Business) at Heads Up For Tails  

In an effort to understand your customers' behavior it is vital to clean up your data to see the behavioral patterns emerge. Once a brand has successfully navigated these murky waters it is important to keep in mind not to fall into any data traps. For example, if a certain audience is currently purchasing your product, try not to entirely focus on that group since it may not be sustainable in the long run as the group may reach saturation. Additionally, simply uncovering customer behavioral data won’t get you immediate results either since different audiences may have different times to conversion.  

When looking at data it is important to look beyond immediate spikes in your metrics. If you are a small business owner, this may be hard as seeing an uptick in website traffic is bound to put a smile on your face. However, always keep in mind that your past 3-to-6-month data may tell you a completely different story. In this case, you may want to investigate the spike and understand what caused it, how you can replicate it and how you should be sustaining it.  

While you’re in the process of acquiring customer data, make it a point to gather customer information in a step-by-step approach. For example, if a first-time visitor lands on your home page and you ask for their name, age, location, email and marital status all at once, it may annoy the customer and there’s a high chance you will lose your lead. Take it slow with your customer and base your data gathering strategy in a manner that builds trust in your brand. This will allow loyalty to come from your customer instead of the brand forcing loyalty on them.  

All the possibilities of propelling your business to the next level lie in your data. The way that you stack, clean and ready your data is what will give you all the answers to the questions that keep you awake at night.  

Key Takeaways

1. Pay attention to search trends - it’ll give you a plethora of insights into what your customers are looking for and what piques their interest  
2. Practice SEM - it’ll tell you how to better optimize your keywords and search campaigns  
3. Track your new and repeat customers - it is always cost effective to nurture current customers than attract new ones. However, do keep in mind that every business is subjective to external factors such as fashion trends or seasonal demand. Since this is an externality that every business faces, it is important to practice a healthy portion of customer acquisition  
4. Monitor your ads and spend - understand that your CPC’s and CPM’s will never be linear. They’re always going to behave depending on many factors such as competition, bid values, internet traffic and so on. During some times of the day, your CPC will go through the roof and at other times, it’ll be relatively cheap. These metrics are seasonal. But keep an eye out and understand them, the insights you gather will be useful  

Tips for SMB’s to Ensure a Great Data-Driven Growth Strategy

For small and medium businesses, it is important to focus on organic reach and organic traffic. This allows you to understand how effective your marketing strategies are since organic metrics are a true representation of how your strategies are performing. Another important tip to keep in mind is that every business should make it a point to provide impeccable customer service. This could be done with personalization, chatbots, clear CTA’s and so on.  

To provide great service, you should listen to your customers. Customer feedback is an important tool when it comes to any marketing activities a business carries out. Talking to your customer gives you feedback on your creatives, your products, your promotional activities and most importantly how you could better meet their expectations. Using this, continue to refine your customer data strategy.

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