E-commerce analytics are the key to understanding customer churn and other critical metrics that reflect the overall health of your e-commerce operations – including subscription analytics. Data drives e-commerce analytics, but merely collecting data doesn’t allow you to make better decisions. Two teams could use the same set of subscription retail data in vastly different ways and garner completely different interpretations. Your strategy for using any kind of data and for choosing which metrics to prioritize should always align with your high-level business objectives.
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A successful e-commerce business starts with standard metrics such as cost per order, average order value, and others, but then digs deeper into more relevant metrics depending on what business process or customer challenge it wants to address. That’s what analytics is, and without it, you won’t be able to make strategic business decisions consistently. You just won’t have enough information at your disposal.
When you do invest in e-commerce analytics, however, you can quickly identify ways to optimize various aspects of your business and, ultimately, achieve game-changing results. With that in mind, here are the top six reasons to start developing your analytics capabilities:
- You’ll learn more about your visitors.
Tools like Google Analytics give you customer insights that can help you optimize your digital storefront to reflect the preferences of your customers. Understanding important metrics — such as page views, time on page, and bounce rate — allows you to learn about customer interests, which you can use to help curate your on-site messaging.
- You’ll enhance user experience.
An optimal user experience is one that offers both speedy browsing and dynamic content. When your site is slow to load or hard to navigate, customers will be quick to leave. Even small hitches in site performance can cause frustration for modern consumers, so make sure to use the data you gather to make small improvements wherever they’re needed.
- You’ll be poised to improve supply chain management.
A huge part of success in business is successfully managing your supply chain. In fact, a supply chain can make or break your company. It has to let you deliver products when you promise to deliver them — and without any hangups in the process. Having a supply chain that’s as efficient as possible will not only help you keep up this end of the bargain, but will also let you reduce costs. Even if you’re tracking products from across the world (especially if, actually), analytics can transform your ability to manage your supply chain well.
- You’ll grow (and so will your e-commerce).
As your business grows, your e-commerce operation will, too. Data analytics can and should be the top driver of that growth. Analytics can track carrier performance, inventory optimization, and order processing and e-commerce order fulfillment. More than that, predictive analytics can help you avoid bottlenecks and make better, faster decisions. When OceanX was growing, we needed more analytics power to keep up. As a result, we searched for a cloud-based solution that could grow with us. Having the right analytics tools in place was no doubt a part of our growth and evolution, and it will be for your business, too.
- You’ll enhance your content marketing.
Compelling content is the key to marketing online, but few companies have the ability to consistently publish valuable, shareable content that everyone loves. That said, there’s a good chance you’ve created at least one or two pieces of content that have resonated with customers. E-commerce analytics helps you identify your best-performing content so that you can use it as a marketing cornerstone. You’ll be able to build subsequent content pieces around it, ensuring that the information you provide addresses real customer pain points and promotes further engagement.
- You’ll improve search engine optimization.
Google Analytics is great for many reasons. Chief among them is the tremendous amount of free functionality it offers. You may already be keeping track of where your site ranks for relevant keywords, but Google Analytics can show you how organic search directly impacts your bottom line. Use it to gain visibility into precise metrics like “pages-per-visit by organic keyword” or “most successful keywords by goal completions,” as well as higher-level KPIs like “all organic visits over time.”
Collecting data doesn’t equate to effective analytics. You could choose to track any combination of metrics, but those that don’t relate to your overarching business strategy don’t deserve your time and attention.
Business intelligence and e-commerce analytics is an investment that can pay off for your subscription service business quickly and that only becomes more valuable over time. There are countless analytics tools available, and they’re getting more powerful seemingly every day. It’s not too late to start taking advantage of them, but if you wait too long, it certainly could be.
