Legendary retail icon John Wanamaker famously noted: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” If you’re still feeling like this today, you are missing an immense opportunity to leverage data analytics for smarter, more accurate decision-making, maximizing your marketing expenditure, and gaining increased returns on your investment.
Product analytics allows you to see the hard facts in real-time providing critical information to optimize eCommerce performance, diagnose problems, and relate customer activity with long-term value. You can assess how well you are meeting customer needs, gain insights into customer behaviors, and base product decisions on metrics to make supported decisions as opposed to guessing your way through merchandising and decision making.
Crunching the data is essential to stay ahead of the game especially at a time where eCommerce is more competitive than ever. It empowers you to identify trends, reduce churn, and personalize customer interaction for long-term gains. However, many businesses often will put off collecting the data they need from their website or they may not check it as regularly as they should. This is partly because gathering all that data can be time-consuming.
The Benefits of Product Analytics in Online Merchandising
Real data should be behind every sequencing and merchandising decision your business makes. Product analytics for eCommerce is essential for merchandising your website and sequencing your products. Information regarding page views, conversion rates, inventory levels, and ratings should inform your merchandising strategy and help you determine how to structure the products and sales processes on your website.
Keeping stock costs your business money. As a retailer, you need to determine whether having certain products on your virtual shelf is worth the maintenance costs. Ecommerce analytics helps your team to determine which products you should continue stocking and which need to be dropped. Ecommerce analytics offer insights into per product sales volumes, customer satisfaction rates, and other vital aspects of the sales process.
Product analytics can result in large overall business gains by reducing abandoned shopping carts, personalizing the customer experience, forecasting inventory levels, as well as measuring and improving marketing campaigns.
Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates
Data gives you insight into customer checkout pain points allowing you to formulate and implement corrective strategies. Reasons customers abandon online purchases include lack of payment options, complicated sign-up processes, and poor site loading times. By monitoring these crucial aspects in real-time, you can determine which areas of your eCommerce store need improvement.
Optimizing Your Product Catalog & Forecasting Inventory
Product analytics offers incredibly valuable insights into customer preferences. This allows you to use data-driven visual merchandising insights to implement photos and layouts that appeal to customers and offer the best user experience. In addition, eCommerce analytics assists in determining product-specific sales volumes and trends helping you to predict which products are trending, which are worth restocking, and which can be limited.
Customer Experience Personalization
It is near impossible to effectively engage your eCommerce audience when you don’t know who your customers are, what they like, and what makes them tick. Understanding customer demographics, purchase behaviors, and churn rates can help you realign your strategy for maximum conversions and promotional impact. Taking it a step further, understanding individual customer needs will allow you to target their specific preferences and shopping style with landing pages most likely to engage them, resulting in more conversions.
Measuring Marketing
Analytics enables you to measure marketing success and allocate marketing budgets more effectively. By measuring ad clicks, site engagement time, channel activity, and promotion performance, you can assess ROI and fine-tune future marketing strategies.
Use Smart Merchandiser Analytics to Manage Products
For many businesses measuring and improving merchandising as well as determining strategies to drive down online shopping cart abandonment rates is a tedious process of sifting through external data, segmenting information, and somehow integrating all the different pieces into a cohesive approach. It is a time-consuming process that does not effectively integrate all data aspects into a uniform strategy.
In recognizing that the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is just below 70%, Smart Merchandiser developed a platform that allows you to make the most of all your data by combining multiple information sources into a single interface–no more shuttling between several different apps or plugins to get all the data you need.
Not only can you access all the data in one place in a way that is easy to understand, but the information is overlayed onto your product images so you can see products views, sales revenue, conversions, inventory levels, and abandonment rates for every single product in real-time.
At Zobrist, we are well aware of the importance of integration with third-party platforms to streamline operations. That’s why Smart Merchandiser can integrate with the likes of Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Coremetrics, and many more. This way, your data is displayed through an analytics overlay on each product page which makes the information much more accessible. So, no matter which tools you prefer to use, you can pull data from each of them and display them in one place. This allows you to see which products are registering high click-through or conversion rates. Armed with this information, you can make key business decisions or changes. For example, products with low click-through rates may need a new photograph or description to grab customer attention.
There’s no need for laborious data analysis for sales figures or website traffic. You won’t need to log into several different accounts to get all the information you need. It can all be accessed directly through Smart Merchandiser’s simple analytics interface. Using data in a contextual way with Smart Merchandiser’s Analytics Overlay allows your merchandising team to sort and sequence your products strategically, improve conversion rates, and develop increasingly effective marketing strategies. Without external spreadsheets and extra applications to navigate and integrate, the Smart Merchandiser Analytics Overlay doesn’t just help you make merchandising decisions faster but helps you make smarter decisions too.
Improve Conversion Rates With Smart Merchandiser
Maximizing your online merchandising strategy without analytics management is a near-impossible task. Even with traditional analytics tools, getting the most out of your analytics management can be a challenging undertaking with a host of metrics to consider, KPIs to track, and a range of separate external data sources to take into account.
With so many different KPIs to watch out for, things can quickly get confusing. Smart Merchandiser ties all these considerations together in a single tool thanks to its dynamic integration capabilities. This enables eCommerce businesses to implement maximum-effect visual merchandising based on analytics so you can make more informed decisions about your business.
From sales, revenue, and abandonment rates to product views, inventory, and conversion rates, Smart Merchandiser’s Analytics Overlay allows you to stay on top of all the data so you can make strategic marketing, merchandising, and design decisions in an instant from a single dashboard.
Schedule a demo today and learn how product analytics with Smart Merchandiser can transform your online business platform, save your team time, and increase conversions to benefit your bottom line.