9 Data-Dependent Marketing Strategies For eCommerce Brands To Thrive In 2022

Data-dependent marketing for eCommerce brands is a fundamental element for all business strategies. It helps you know what to sell, who your target audience is, what platforms are preferable and what strategies are likely to be the most effective and cost-efficient. However, the role of data in eCommerce marketing is always changing, reflective of new approaches and emerging technologies. This makes having a data strategy for digital marketing important for brands in order to survive and thrive in a particular industry, irrelevant of any external factors that might be happening in 2021.

When it comes to a modern audience, the majority of users are highly mobile and dependent on a variety of handheld devices and platforms in which they like to stay connected, browse the internet, and, importantly, interact with brands. Marketing today is driven by data-backed research and customer information that can be captured at every stage of the buying process, creating a feedback loop that is always being refined and updated. Marketers and eCommerce brands no longer need to guess what people want or have to work solely from gut feel or intuition, instead the role of data in eCommerce marketing is now about knowing where to look and which strategies to focus on.

Data-Dependent Marketing Trends

In today’s marketplace with all the tools available to you, there’s no reason to be unaware of what your customers want. One of the many benefits of data-dependent marketing is that there are now a wide variety of tools that enable marketers to capture and then utilize different data sets at specific stages in a particular campaign. Fortunately for marketers, the digital revolution has created a much wider reach with a far greater degree of targeting accuracy, something that is relevant in the face of constantly emerging consumer trends.

Essentially, marketing needs to be data-driven to be effective. If you know your target user’s behavior, goals, and challenges, you can develop campaigns that look to provide solutions to their specific needs. Following data trends such as a user browsing patterns, social media activity, online purchase behavior, cart abandonment rate, keyword searches, and many other metrics can help bring an overall clarity, and a more focused direction to your marketing campaigns. Data is, and now will always be, at the core of any successful marketing strategy which is why understanding data-dependent marketing for eCommerce brands has such a high priority placed upon it in today’s digital marketplace.

The Benefits of Data-Dependent Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Brands

If you’re hoping to help develop your eCommerce brand, drive more engaged traffic which is more likely to convert, understanding the marketing strategies that are available to you is directly linked to success. Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been a pivotal year for eCommerce brands. The pandemic greatly increased the importance of digital customers, online shopping and accelerated the growth of this entire industry far more than any of the previous estimates predicted, a trend which is only expected to continue in some capacity as we move into 2021 and beyond.

eCommerce marketing, especially when collected insights are paired with data-driven storytelling tips, is the process of driving traffic to your brand, converting traffic to sales and making your brand visible to all who are likely to be interested. These strategies are typically dynamic and fluid, evolving as the industry itself evolves and audiences change, to help achieve the best ROI rates possible. Utilizing these strategies based upon solid data collection and informed decision making will help you to achieve your goals for 2021 as it relates to your business.

With this in mind, here are 9 Data-Dependent Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Brands you should look to incorporate in 2021:

1. Emphasize The Personal

According to recent studies, over half of all marketers state there is a clear demand for personal, customer-centric communications. Fortunately, big data and analytics enable marketers to create highly targeted campaigns with explicitly personalized communications, such as newsletters, emails, updates, and curate product lists that match prior purchases. With carefully analyzed data to back their marketing strategies, marketers have a much better idea of not just when to send marketing messages, but what the actual content of these messages should be, as brands like Passenger clothing embody with their eCommerce campaigns. With a personalized content and communications strategy, you are directly engaging with an already interested audience, increasing the chance of forming a connection and therefore encouraging positive engagements and actions.

2. Unify Customer Experience – In the same study, 49% of brands said they use data-driven marketing to enhance the customer experience with satisfaction surveys to help identify areas for improvement with their customer experience. Customer value analytics let marketers prioritize the sales cycle without compromising the personalized service previously mentioned. Instead of undermining customer relationships and making them seem more robotic, big data helps to provide an omnichannel service that enhances the customer experience through promoting consistency across all channels, something ASOS does incredibly well. Whether you contacted them via social media, over the phone, or through face to face interactions, customers want to receive the key pieces of information they need while not having a drop in quality between platforms.

3. Automate Processes

With so much data to process, marketers can easily become overwhelmed. But if a data-driven strategy is going to be successful, a lot of information from many different sources is needed to generate useful insights. This is where automating processes helps. Investing in marketing automation tools will soon be the norm and it’s about being ahead of the competition, now more than ever. Finding the relevant data you need has to be done in a timely manner otherwise it becomes redundant. Letting an algorithm filter out what you do and don’t need will help your entire process become more efficient and effective.

4. Monitor ROI

Previously it was difficult to accurately track and monitor ROI, as well as the overall campaign impact following it’s launch. Big data and database marketing however have allowed campaign managers to closely monitor ongoing campaigns, conduct A/B tests, measure results, and analyze the impact once completed. This, in turn, helps them optimize their efforts and improve performance on a regular basis, both for this campaign as well as future ones.

5. Build Brand identity

Big data allows marketers to observe how users prefer to interact with your eCommerce brand through monitoring websites, social media channels, and a customer’s digital footprint. This can be through discovering honest reviews, testimonials, and unbiased criticisms about your company, products, and service offerings, while also asking users for their direct feedback as well. This information can help you uncover your brand reputation while also then using it to improve your overall image based on the data you find across social media and the internet in general. Brands can monitor their social proof and respond to issues quickly, resolving them before they become a permanently damaging matter that can lead to lost customers.

6. Take Advantage of Competitor Mistakes

Social monitoring technology can also be used externally as well as internally. It does not just have to be for reputation management or audience insight, but instead for observing and analyzing competitor marketing strategies too. These big data tools for competitive analysis can be an effective way to generate campaign inspiration, improve your current practices and, perhaps most importantly, learn from mistakes committed by competitors before you make them yourself.

7. Collect Location Data

Location data regarding searches and purchases can be valuable to savvy marketers. It means that campaigns can be optimized through aligning any upcoming go-to-market strategies with locations that have already seen the best sales potential. These insights can help brands review which products are selling the most in specific countries or cities, which ones aren’t, and decide on your next steps based on those reports helping alleviate any potential issues relating to either over- or understocking certain products.

8. Pricing

Big data has come so far that it’s now possible to even use it to optimize your pricing strategies based on what the information is presenting. This is something that can have wide-ranging and significant effects on your ROI, as something as simple as a 1% price increase could result in a much larger improvement in operating profits. Any marketer who is not looking to use big data to inform their pricing structures is missing out a huge advantage which can greatly impact your brand’s bottom line.

9. Solicit Feedback

While already touched upon, user feedback is incredibly valuable data. Factors such as incentivized online surveys can be a great way to help determine the specific direction your marketing strategy needs to take, as well as where you can improve your business immediately. Customers may be reluctant to take the time to complete a survey, so encouraging them is a key part of this. Through things like gift cards, coupons, discounts or first access when new products are released, customers will provide feedback if they can benefit from it. A questionnaire that is concise and clear can obtain valuable information that can have an immediate impact. If you want to see fast growth based on hard data, a survey is an inherently useful approach.

Final Thoughts

Advanced data analytics and metrics are now immediately available to those who want them. There are a litany of tools at your disposal, both free and paid, that marketers and eCommerce brands employ to their advantage. From looking to provide creative direction for upcoming campaigns to the price of particular products, the benefits of data-dependent marketing are crucial for success in this digital era. Implementing these ideas and strategies can completely change the way in which your eCommerce brand operates in the years to come and it is now a question of when you start implementing them, as opposed to just if.