With increasing competition on digital channels, eCommerce brands are seeing a shift towards a more personalized shopping experience powered by data-driven insights. Because brands are losing out on data from third-party sources due to changes in data regulation, they are shifting towards gaining customer insights through zero-party data — information intentionally shared with a brand by a customer. For this reason, it’s crucial brands collect and leverage accurate and insightful data.
We already know that customer reviews are a crucial component of any eCommerce strategy, especially when it comes to helping brands build engagement and trust around a brand’s product that a customer may not be able to try before purchasing. However, aside from simply optimizing the collection and display of reviews, reviews can also be a key source of data that brands can use to glean customer insights. When equipped with the proper reporting tools, insights from customer reviews can be one of a brand’s most powerful assets when it comes to understanding its customers.
At first glance, a trend toward data-driven eCommerce solutions might appear to be a tall order for brands of all sizes. However, eCommerce solutions, powered by data, are much more approachable than one might think. To explore this further, we’ll discuss the role and importance of consumer data in eCommerce and highlight benefits and practices for understanding customer insights and data reporting.
What do customer analytics and reporting mean for eCommerce brands?
Ultimately, the goal of data analytics is to reveal trends, provide businesses with actionable insights, and offer more clarity and context for large datasets. But, what do data analytics and reporting mean for eCommerce brands?
Data analysis and data reporting provide brands with in-depth customer insights, giving them a deeper understanding of their customers. By leveraging robust customer data reports, brands can turn actionable insights into impactful site, product, and messaging enhancements. More so, by analyzing customer data (i.e. customer analytics), you can get to know your customers and deliver more personalized experiences.
What is customer analytics?
Customer analytics involves analyzing data provided by customers at any point in the customer lifecycle. According to Gartner, the objective of customer analytics involves leveraging data to get a better understanding of your customers (i.e., satisfaction, needs, and wants). For eCommerce brands, whose shopping experience includes digital and remote interactions, leveraging customer analytics is crucial for growth. This leads us to data reporting.
What is data reporting?
Data reporting is the process surrounding transforming data into a readable format with usable insights. Data reporting often takes a more visual appearance and translates large amounts of information into digestible graphs, charts, and diagrams. But more importantly, data reporting lets brands answer questions about their customers and helps tell a larger story about audiences.
The easy-to-read format provided by data reporting solutions takes customer analytics and insights to a new level. With robust data reporting tools, eCommerce brands can now use data to identify trends, quantify potential shortcomings, and build solutions with a higher degree of certainty.
Email dashboard, with customer insights collected from Yotpo Reviews.
And with this, companies can unlock new avenues that might not be visible at first glance, such as creating strategies that drive customer engagement, increase retention, and boost conversion. For instance, brands can turn customer feedback, provided in Reviews or Q&A, into actionable insights with data reporting. Now, let’s look at some of the benefits for brands that leverage analytics and data reporting.
Predictive analytics — customer behavior and trends
Tracking customer insights over time helps brands discover trends in customer data and forecast behavior, empowering brands to make better decisions and stay competitive. By leveraging advanced data reporting capabilities, companies can track the success of new campaigns, customer sentiment over time, and product lifetime success.
Yotpo’s Insights dashboard, with customer sentiment scores.
6 ways eCommerce brands can leverage data analytics and reporting
Here are some of the main benefits of data analytics, including some of Yotpo’s data reporting capabilities that highlight how data provides brands with the information they need to understand their customers and make cost-saving and timely decisions.
1. Improve product development
By looking at trends in reviews, brands can make important product decisions to course correct or improve products, either found in customer complaints or communication and messaging in product descriptions. With filtering capabilities, brands can see which recurring products, keywords, and more are being mentioned in customer reviews.
For instance, Yotpo’s Insights tool allows you to check out sentiment scores by product or topic to understand customer sentiment around often-mentioned topics like fit and quality. Understanding specific pain points around different products helps brands course-correct by reaching out to their manufacturer to make adjustments.
2. Create clear customer segmentation
Using data collected from customers can make it easy to target specific segments of customers with targeted messaging. For example, a brand could target all customers who have submitted a 4-star or above review with a special email campaign promoting a new product while they might target customers who have submitted 1-star or 2-star reviews with a coupon to try a different item.
3. Improve conversion rates
The more data you have around your customers, the better chance you have of understanding what motivates them and what will drive them to make a purchase. For example, brands like Dossier are able to leverage customer data, helping trigger more personalized messages for offers and updates. Specifically, the brand diversified their communication channels, adding SMS, after learning where their shoppers spend their time, primarily on mobile devices, and their preferred communication method, SMS. This resulted in a 2X increase in CVR with SMS review requests compared to email.
4. Enhance brand messaging
Customer insights can help brands improve their brand messaging. By observing customer sentiment mentioned in product reviews, site reviews, and user-generated content, brands can understand what actually resonates with customers and ultimately enhance their on-site messaging and product descriptions. By refining brand and product messaging you can strengthen your brand identity and build brand trust.
5. Increase customer sentiment
With tools such as reviews tagging and filtering, businesses can identify customer sentiment trends. Particularly, with Yotpo’s review tagging, brands can categorize reviews by categories such as “top shopper,” “needs follow up,” “shipping issues,” and more. Categorizing reviews and creating custom reports based on reviews tags helps keep your insights organized so brands can easily identify insights from happy customers or have specific teams target problem areas to make the necessary adjustments.
6. Track product launch progress
Yotpo’s reviews reporting capabilities allow brands to filter reviews by product. Being able to filter new products and monitor the success of their release can help you make timely adjustments. The ability to make quick adjustments in messaging, product descriptions, etc. during a product release can greatly impact the success of a launch.
Best practices for leveraging data reporting and insights
While advanced data reporting capabilities do most of the heavy lifting for brands, it’s important to keep a few things in mind when leveraging customer insights and analytics. Here’s how to maximize the full potential of customer data and maintain the quality of your data.
- Be sure to prioritize data organization and maintenance. Leverage tools such as reviews tags to help organize and manage customer insights as you scale.
- Focus on tracking product goals and engagement milestones. Consider using filters, scheduled reports, or report templates to ensure that you’re tracking product success and customer insights over time.
- Share insights with other teams, such as sales, marketing, and design team members. Explore using custom reports to flag specific insights to easily share with certain teams, or use a tool like Yotpo Insights to share useful summary insights around products or topics (which are now available on Prime and up!).
- Create data connections throughout your tech stack. Sharing data across your tech stack, by leveraging connected solutions through a platform approach, can reduce siloing customer insights across solutions.
Advanced data reporting capabilities provide brands with in-depth customer insights.
Undoubtedly, leveraging data and customer insights is a must in today’s fast-growing post-cookie landscape. As we continue to see a shift towards a primarily zero-party data online space, companies need to stay competitive in their data collection and management processes. With robust data reporting, such as Yotpo’s, brands can get to know their customers on a deeper level, helping anticipate what shoppers really want.
