There’s no question that the future of e-commerce is in personalization. But you can’t improve your customers’ online shopping experience (or retain existing customers) without understanding what it is they want in the first place — which means you need to be understanding, and then acting, on whatever data you’re collecting.
Figuring out where to start is daunting, so I asked 9 successful founders the following question:
What is one piece of data that most novice e-commerce entrepreneurs wouldn’t think about collecting to create a more customized experience?
Their answers are below:
1. Payment Dates and Amounts for RFM
By simply collecting and using data on the most recent payment and purchase dates, you can market around the concept of RFM (recency, frequency and monetary value). For example, a customer who purchased something several months ago could be tempted to purchase a new product with a promo code, which saves him from becoming a lost customer.
On the flipside, someone who very recently purchased might not need a special promotion to purchase again soon if he is still in the hot lead mentality.
– Patrick Conley, Automation Heroes
2. Purchasing Factors
Everyone has one factor, person or publication that sways her to make purchasing decisions. It is very helpful to know what this is so you can get an idea of what influences your customers’ buying decisions. You can get this by asking them at checkout, sending email surveys or by displaying pop-ups as they browse.
– Vanessa Van Edwards, Science of People
3. Customer Email Addresses
If you forget everything else, remember to get a customer’s email address. If you get email addresses, you can use them to get anything else from customers at a future date and time. Once you have their email addresses in your email marketing software, you can email customers with surveys, promotions, product launches, free tools, educational content or anything that might be of value to them.
Most e-commerce software lets you collect an email address, and then you can use a tool such as Zapier to push it to your desired email marketing tool.
4. Referral Behavior
Customers who come through specific referral channels tend to behave similarly due to the shared characteristics that brought them through that channel in the first place. You can leverage that information to make smart decisions about how much to spend to acquire such customers and what tactics to use to bring them back.
5. Personalized User Feedback
Every novice e-commerce entrepreneur authenticates to Facebook and calls it a day. The real identity comes from an address, which allows you to create significant value for a user-oriented experience specific to geography, income, style, surroundings (people and neighbors) and natural exposures that a user interacts with most frequently. From there, you can innovate with insights based on real user feedback.
It’s 2013 — you can’t afford not to be personalized and relevant.
6. Skill Level of Clients
If you know from the very beginning of the sales process that your lead or client is a beginner or expert, the whole game can be changed. Instead of teaching the client the basics, you can jump right to the advanced education or program she needs most. To collect this, you can ask the lead to assess her skill level with a radio button that has three options to select.
By targeting your communication to each level, you’re able to demonstrate that you understand and can serve your clients’ needs.
– Kelly Azevedo, She’s Got Systems
7. Customers’ Phone Numbers
Depending on the price point of your e-commerce business, you can capture a phone number, which is an incredibly valuable tool. I often call people right after a big purchase and thank them personally. It is just one more way of building brand loyalty and enhancing the customer experience in an unexpected way.
– Sean Ogle, Location 180, LLC
8. Historical Data
Historical data is key to building new customer experiences. If you are an advertiser, you need to understand what works and what does not when customers have been sold to before. Without this information and competitive data, it’s difficult to know what customers will respond to positively. Strive to address customers’ pain points with new functionality.
9. EPC Values
E-commerce entrepreneurs should run a paid advertising campaign and learn the value of a click to your site — otherwise known as the EPC (earnings per click). For 100 orders, divide the total profit generated by those orders by the number of clicks it took to generate them. Once you know this number, you can scale your business, then find other places to advertise where you can buy clicks cheaper than that figure.
Header image credit: Pond5
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.