Harness the Power of Data-Driven Decisions to Scale Your ECommerce Store!
Drew Blumenthal (Digital Marketing And Advertising Guru)
| Digital Marketing | Digital Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Digital Drew SEM | Founder & CEO | New York |
My family tells me I was a born entrepreneur. In some way, they’re kind of right. The thrill of business, from running my own lemonade stand to offering babysitting services, has always fueled me in my life.
Today, at 29, I have my own marketing agency and we’re a team of 10 people.
I set out on a mission to start my own identity. Today, I go by Digital Drew.
After working with multiple agencies and Fortune 500 businesses, I’ve learned a lot.
One of the biggest lessons? Never forget the basics.
Like Kobe said: “Why do you think I'm the best player in the world? Because I never ever get bored with the basics”
That’s why I’ve decided to start my newsletter.
So that I can go over the basics with you and sometimes share my experiences as well so that you can be empowered with the knowledge to succeed in your business. Regardless of what you do, digital marketing can help you.
SaaS business? Show people, you understand their pain and troubles.
Ecom? Let the crowd know what they’re missing out on.
Service-Based biz? Craft an offer they’ll feel bad saying no to.
Sounds pretty simple and basic, right? Exactly. Despite this, many get stuck, confused or even end up giving up.
So, let's get to work and start focusing on the simple things.
Today, I’ll be covering how you can work on scaling your Ecom store, simply by making decisions off of data. Let’s get to it.
The very first thing you want to do is try to understand your customer.
You could try to find them and have a call. Maybe do a quiz. However, the easiest thing you have at your disposal is data.
Things like page views, time spent on a specific page, which and how many products were added to the cart, how many people actually followed through etc.
All of the data you have, as well as how it is changing over time, can help you get a clearer picture of how your customer might think, their behaviors as well as what they may want. In turn, this will help you make more informed decisions and approaches when you go to implement different strategies and approaches.
That could be from tweaking targeting on a Google Ad to entirely revamping your creative for a Facebook campaign. Or maybe no changes at all, because it’s a Wednesday evening and people might be more focused on deciding what to cook for dinner instead of scrolling through your store and deciding which pair of shoes would match the new jeans they bought.
Understanding how they’re making decisions will, on a whole, help you make more and better-informed decisions.
If you haven’t already, you’re better off getting started with some type of software or platform that helps you make sense of the various data. That could be a Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) system or a marketing analytics platform. This will not just help you collect the data but make it easier to analyze as well.
Remember that there are multiple metrics that you’ll be filtering through. It’s important to focus on only those that matter, rather than getting overwhelmed by the sudden influx of data.
Another way to capitalize on the data is to use it to make your overall Ecommerce operations more optimized and possibly more streamlined.
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Things such as supply chain management, product pricing and service fulfillment processes have a substantial impact on your bottom line.
Making informed decisions, such as pre-ordering to avoid being out of stock for a specific season, to ordering less than usual to prevent incurring more storage fees and so on can be things that can go a long way to helping you save and make more.
You could go so far as to modify your delivery times accordingly. If your customers aren’t all that affected if they get their product within two weeks vs two days, you might want to consider finding the sweet spot so as to make the most of their expectations while also saving expedited shipping costs, furthering your savings in the process.
Additionally, you might want to consider pairing various products with others, promoting upsells, if their searching behavior on the app or website indicates that. Reducing the friction of their shopping experience and giving them what they want increases the chances of them coming back for more. With short attention spans and extremely dynamic moods, you want to reduce the chances of them leaving for another product and ending up not buying.?
For such backend-focused optimizations, you’re better off combining your frontend customer behavior analytics with an inventory management system or a logistics tracking platform. With both of them side by side, you can track their behavior in a more in-depth manner while also enabling yourself to make more informed decisions.
Finally, this data can be used to help you squeeze even more out of your marketing and ad spending. However, you need to be a bit more careful and cautious when it comes to making modifications here because one wrong move could mean a big chunk of your marketing budget being burnt on a keyword or segmented target audience which has no potential or purchasing intent.
After identifying your customer and their behaviors, you can use that data to try targeting similar audiences.
In order to see some results, you’re better off setting a few ground rules.
Deciding beforehand on things like
Will not just give you something substantial to work with. Doing so will also ensure that you’re not simply experimenting without a goal to achieve something.
Integrating a Web analytics tool would be the way to go. Combining that with the backend tracking as well as the customer behavior, you now have a full stack of tools giving you the right information to make the right decisions.
To recap, you’ll want to set up the software to track your
So that, when it comes to making any changes or modifications to anything from your testing strategy and your ad creatives to your website design and landing page structures, you’ll have something to base that off of.
Obviously, as you delve further into how which metrics are being impacted by which things, you can decide to narrow down on bettering them even further.
For example:
You might have a high bounce rate because your website doesn’t load quickly enough. Additionally, the loading from cart to payment takes too long, which is why many people might be leaving and then coming back later.
So, instead of sending a discount email prematurely to get them to buy their cart, you might want to focus on optimizing the website and payment page loading times so that they don’t go off the page. This way, you’ll have identified a potential problem, and won’t have to give out discount codes to those who’re already ready and willing to buy.
This is just one of the many ways you can use the data at your fingertips in a useful and productive way.
If this seems like quite a bit, don’t worry. there’s no need to get overwhelmed. Just get started and explore things along the way. Setup those three softwares, see how they go, and what type of conclusions you come to. You’ll be surprised at how much guesswork gets cut out of the equation when you have something substantial to go off of.
And if you need a helping hand with your ads or creatives, you’re in luck.
I can help you get to work on scaling your Ecom Store faster, more easily, and without all the guesswork that comes with growing online. Just let me know how I can help.
Until next time,
Drew