The New Year is a bittersweet spell of sorts when it comes to business for retailers. While the New Year goodness and the holiday sales spike is all well and good, the sales slump that all-too-usually follows the new year festivities is often a retailer's nightmare. 

Hacking this economic decline requires two sure-fire elements — an effective e-commerce growth strategy and a solid grasp on how to nurture and grow customer relationships. The reality kicks in hard for retailers post-holidays as most customers have spent their money on gifts. So, these tips help keep a steady inflow of customers, keeping them engaged, and reducing churn. 

By the end of this post, you should have the full insider scoop on Data-driven marketing and the opportunity it presents (no pun intended) to your business. You’re also set to gain tried-and-true tips on how to hack e-commerce growth in this notoriously tricky time of year, setting your retail shop up for that good-to-great transformation!

A Bit of a Backstory

Old-school marketers had to do loads of guesswork about their targets, launching multiple campaigns based on these assumptions in the hope that at least one campaign would yield results. As you'd expect—loads of ad spend down the drain, while successful campaigns often got poorly compensated with low conversion rates. 

Enter data-driven marketing. 

Today, Data-driven marketing’s burst on the scene, and it’s the warfare equivalent of replacing scatterguns with some good old-fashioned sniper (woohoo! laser-precision.) Now, marketers can gain helpful, in-depth specific knowledge about potential customers to make informed marketing decisions—bull’s eye!

It's a force multiplier, especially for retail businesses and SaaS. One that harnesses tools and systems provided by new technology infrastructure to collect and analyse real consumer data which would improve business outcomes.

A Target-Centric Approach to E-commerce Growth

Data-Driven Marketing comprises a set of techniques that enable you to obtain valuable information using data from customer interaction. Think of it as a honeypot designed to attract and inspire customer loyalty or a desired action through personalized messaging, not a megaphone brimming with nothing but digital noise. 

Data-driven marketing makes it easier for you to understand customers’ behaviours and preferences to fashion a more effective marketing strategy. This helps you funnel down (pun absolutely intended!) on your target, catering to their specific pain points depending on where they are in the sales funnels. 

A report released by the Economist Intelligence Unit in conjunction with Tableau revealed that companies with strong data systems are three times more likely to be financially successful than competitors using less-developed ones. While the development process might seem daunting, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze as data-driven organizations act with more agility to achieve business objectives and maximize marketing investments. 

So, there goes your shot at ramping up that bottom line in a way that’s sure to also help your brand gain some rep (solid brand reputation).

Forms of Data-Driven Marketing

We’ve listed some really good examples of Data-Driven Marketing below:

— Personalised Email Marketing

Say a lady walks into a store and tells the store attendant she's only looking to buy a pair of shoes. You’d agree that it's absurd if she was shown dresses, scarves, or anything else besides shoes. That’s the logic behind personalized email campaigns. 

There's no need to send ads via emails to a consumer that does not need or want your product. Personalized email marketing makes use of personalized emails directed at specific customers. 

With data analysis, you can find your specific target demographic and market your products to them in the most effective way. There’s also the option to send follow-up emails after initial purchases for the odd up-sell, announcement of special sales etc. It all depends on the level of insight that the data gives you.

— Data-Driven Content

People are more likely to rock on with other individuals with whom they share common interests and pain points. With data-driven marketing, you can craft content that will speak directly to your target audience, address whatever pain points they may be top-of-mind for them. 

This kind of content helps build a special bond between you and your customer and improves their trust in your products. Remember, it’s all about growing customer relationships to build trust, so when the discussion about your product/service pops, they don’t see it as someone trying to close a sale on them. 

They’d rather see you as a friend spinning a good yarn that could bring them value. 

5 Ways Data-driven Marketing Can Supercharge Your Ecommerce Growth

As a retailer, growing the customer relationship also eases the data collection and interpretation process. The majority of a retailer's data are within their scope including customer data, competitive intelligence, market data, research data, transaction data etc. 

Hence, you should adopt a combination of data and analytical techniques that keep you/your marketing team informed about the changing needs of your customers and the best way to market your products to them. 

Here are some of the benefits your retail store stands to enjoy from data-driven marketing:

1. Create a Quality Customer Experience

With the aid of deep background information, you can personalize the experiences of your customers, which is a great way to build brand trust. Your ability to create an awesome quality consumer experience has a straight-line correlation with better ROI. 

2. Optimise Your Marketing Spend Allocation                                               

The various analytics tools available in data-driven marketing make it possible for marketers to know what portion of the advertisement budget generated the most conversion and brand awareness. A good gauge of what moves your customers would help in effectively allocating your budget. 

3. Improve Your Copywriting and Content Creation

This form of marketing aims to gain more insight into the content that your customers prefer to deliver the right message with your ads. Accordingly, you can craft relevant copies and improve messaging that your audience connects better with. This hands them the keys to a better understanding of your offerings, so they take positive, more informed product decisions. 

4. Gather more Insight for your e-commerce Growth 

Another advantage of data-driven marketing over the traditional methods is that they help you discover how best to target your customers. So, it’s a lot easier to place ads in places where your prospective customers are in abundance. 

5. Better Decision-making 

Data allows you to make more accurate marketing decisions than simply going with your gut feeling. 

Mapping Out Your Data Processes for Improved E-commerce Growth 

Ever prepared and/or implemented actionable data-to-action processes in your e-commerce for growth? These steps have been proven effective in implementing a data-driven marketing culture:

— First, the data to be collected and analyzed must be relevant to your market, competitors, and customers. You can give your data collection and analysis efforts a fair chance by solving problems related to specific needs and rewarding your team for analysis. Not merely collecting data. 

— Develop an infrastructure that enables the smooth collection, management and analysis of data. Building a data structure helps in finding the link between different types of data and leveraging insightful information to optimize your marketing strategy. 

— Begin the implementation process for data collection and usage, and consistently carry this out. Developing your business’s data-driven marketing policies involves creating and maintaining processes that support the cleansing of data, its collection, and analysis. So, you can identify any necessary adjustments and make changes. 

You/your marketing team should embody a data-to-insights culture that reviews data, data infrastructures and data policies periodically to see how ideal the data is, for taking the right action. Over time, these processes of data collection and analysis yield improved results with greater profit implications. 

Every step discussed in this section would help you make better business decisions with data. By developing a data-to-insights culture, you gain more experience in data-driven marketing practices. So, you can trigger e-commerce growth and be relevant within your industry. Most retail store owners run without any particular role distinctions. That is, playing the part of both owner and marketer. 

With the aid of these data-based inferences, you stand an exceedingly better chance compared to an uninformed competitor. 

Your No-Fuss, Seamless Solution

In the world we live in today, inboxes tend to be saturated with e-mails, and every so often, we are inundated with marketing communications that fail to take stock of the recipient’s needs and preferences, or are downright irrelevant. 

For most retailers, we could probably draw a mathematical curve, illustrating the inverse relationship between astronomical amounts of marketing spend and the desired outcome. This has little to do with insufficient leads, but more to do with a data void that means you end up shooting blanks. 

This can only mean one thing — we get where this shoe pinches!

With APSIS One, you’re getting an intuitive, data-driven Martech stack that’ll help you recover up to a whopping 20% of your sales. 400% increased sales through automated emails vs. bulk, 30% increase in customer retention, 50% resources saved with automation, 25% advertising budget saved, 100% reduced implementation cost.

E-commerce integrations such as Shopify and Magento? Check. Product Recommendation add-on? Check. 

And Yeap, you heard that right! We’re tooting our own horn. After much ink has been spilt on efficient data-driven marketing, it’d be a total letdown if we didn’t show that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Wouldn’t it?

The Best Time to Act was... Yesterday.

Are we the best Martech on the block? Fair to say we’re a bit biased. And that’s OK. But surely: We belong right up there! 

To refine your company's marketing strategy, explore what APSIS One has to offer and prepare to get all excited for some e-commerce growth! Maybe even book a demo and try it out for yourself!