Managing customer data to stimulate sales in an online store

We have repeatedly indicated in our reviews that the online trading market is developing very actively today, demonstrating stable growth. This opinion is also confirmed by various studies, including from fairly authoritative platforms. In particular, in one of its latest reports, AKIT, that is, the Association of Internet Trade Companies, indicates that over the past year, the overall online sales market showed growth of more than 40%. Over the past period of this year, this trend has continued. Moreover, there are indirect reasons to claim that the final figures may exceed the previous figures.

What conclusions should an online store draw from this? Of course, the first and most important thing here is to attract the attention of the audience to your site. The more people visit the catalogs of your online store, the greater the chance that they will like this or that product and place an order. But, unfortunately, not everything is so simple here. Today, there is serious competition in most niches, which in itself complicates the process of attracting an audience to the pages of your online presence. So how can you make sure that the audience chooses you?

The simplest, but at the same time effective solution is to provide personalized offers. Those that take into account the interests of the potential buyer, correspond to his requests. But you will not be able to implement such an idea without detailed information on each potential buyer. And now a natural question arises: where to get all this data? If you have been working in the market for a long time, then most likely you have already had many customers. And this means that all the information that can be useful for preparing personalized offers and organizing effective interaction with the audience, by and large, you already have. You just need to use it correctly. This is what will make your business more competitive, that is, it will help you stand out from the crowd and effectively attract the audience to the pages of the online store.

In today's review, we will consider such an issue as customer data management. We will tell you how it all works in practice and what benefits it guarantees to the business. We will give a number of examples of real online stores that have managed to achieve excellent results by correctly using information about customers. We will talk about how to scale up the work of your business as much as possible, having accurate information about the target audience and their competent use in practice. The presented information will allow you to take a completely different look at customer data as such and learn how to effectively use it to develop your own online store.

Features of customer data management

In principle, absolutely every business can manually collect all the necessary information about its customers, structure it, highlight important points. But, unfortunately, such work will require a lot of time, effort, and the involvement of an impressive team of managers. And it is one thing if we are talking about a small company with a couple of hundred customers and quite another if it is a huge business with a million-strong audience. Therefore, in such work, you cannot do without special tools that can automate actions.

User data management is a niche in which today there is no need to “reinvent the wheel”. There are already many reliable and proven software solutions here, among which the most advanced and effective is rightfully the Customer Data Platform, that is CDP. Here we are talking about a platform that will automatically collect information about customers from both online sources and offline points of sale. With its help, you will be able to literally analyze the history of interaction between a specific buyer and your company in detail, which will become the basis for building targeted and effective communication in the future, ensuring high efficiency in practice. You will be able to make interesting offers to your customers, quickly find a common language, attract them to your interactive activities, get the most out of the launched advertising campaigns. Statistics obtained during research show that today over 80% of buyers make a purchase after receiving an interesting personalized offer.

To make it clearer to you how everything works here in practice, let's look at a small example. Let's say we are talking about an online tea and coffee store. It has several online representations. This is the official website of the company, a business page in several social networks, say VKontakte and Instagram, an account in the Telegram messenger, where a chatbot is configured for ease of use. And, of course, for more convenient interaction with the audience, providing information about their promotions, special offers, catalog additions, an electronic newsletter is used. Information about orders is sent to the CRM system.

So, the business is targeting a wide audience. It decides to display the same type of content on all of its online representations. As a result, each subscriber visiting the page will see the same information: here is tea, here is coffee, and here are 15% discounts on pu-erh. Do you think this solution will give good results in practice? Most likely, no, since the target audience here is very, very wide, many people want to buy tea or coffee at a discount, but not everyone likes pu-erh tea.

Now let's imagine a slightly different picture. The head of this online store decides to make radical changes to the operation of his business and implements a CDP. After this decision, all information about his customers begins to flow into a single database for storage. That is, in the same place, data is collected on those who ordered tea or coffee on the site, through each of the social networks, chat bot in Telegram, who followed the link from your ad. Thanks to this, you can segment your audience. Alternatively, you can not only highlight those who like tea and those who prefer coffee. Segmentation can be very detailed, literally pinpoint. Alternatively, you can separately highlight those who choose classic black tea, green tea, and provide additional breakdowns by more specific tea categories. Similar actions can be performed with coffee lovers: Arabica, Robusta, green coffee. The audience may also have their own preferences for drink manufacturers and even price ranges.

As a result, you can offer each of your customers individual conditions for purchasing exactly the tea or coffee that they prefer. Those people who simply visited your site, studied the catalog, but never made an order, can be offered a promotional code for the first purchase of the drink that they were interested in earlier. Thanks to this, conversion rates will be higher. The audience will more actively interact with your online presence, communicate with managers. As a result, all this will contribute to an increase in impressions or sales, as a result, your income.

That is, Customer Data Platform — This is a tool that will allow you to get to know your target audience better, find out the preferences of both current customers and those who have already had contact with the site, accounts on social networks or other platforms and make personal offers to each of them, thereby improving the user experience, recognition in the market, increasing your own income.

Along with this, the practical application of CDP in user data management guarantees a number of other equally important advantages for businesses:

• All information about your audience will be stored in one place. This will significantly reduce the time it takes to find the information you need. Moreover, you can create a standard client profile, add options that are relevant to you, and then the system itself will update the information in these files in real time. Most of these profiles contain information about visited pages, viewed product categories and individual products, information about subscriptions to newsletters or social networks, as well as data such as social status, age, gender. The convenient thing is that information from disparate sources will regularly be sent to one repository and will be constantly kept up to date. As a result, you will be able to make adjustments to the communication process if certain changes occur, thereby retaining customers.
• Simple and fast customer identification. The CDP is based on the omnichannel principle, whereby all information about the buyer will be automatically synchronized in this system. As a result, as soon as a person contacts you, or calls a manager, all the information about this client will immediately appear on the specialist's screen. This is what will allow you to personalize communication, offer useful and interesting products that this buyer is looking for. Moreover, you can easily start communicating with a person on one channel, and then continue on another, knowing the previous history, that is, maintaining the context.
• Implementation of the most accurate, one might even say point segmentation. In the event that you have the most comprehensive idea of your customers, based on the information accumulated in the CDP system, you can break them down into fairly narrow segments. Alternatively, this could be a favorite product category or a separate product, frequency of purchases, place of residence, average check. Above, in the example, we have already considered this point in detail. Thanks to this, you will be able to make a personalized mailing list and offer relevant offers to a specific category of buyers, rather than spreading yourself out among everyone at once, including those who are not interested in a specific product at all.
• Automation of work processes. Using the CDP system in your practice, you will be able to develop a number of scenarios for sending trigger letters for different cases. As an option, you can send a welcome message and a selection of the most popular products to those who visited your pages for the first time. Before the buyer's birthday, do not forget to offer him an additional discount on the product. To those who have already placed orders with you, send a selection of related products to those already purchased. This is everything that can interest a person and stimulate him to place an order. The convenient thing is that now you do not have to spend a lot of time on all this, segment the audience represented in the database. Moreover, sending such letters will be automatic, responding to a particular action taken by the user. You can read more about this point in the article «Trigger mailing in modern marketing».

If you have been working in the online sales market for a long time, then you probably know that the best way to ensure stable orders is to offer what customers are looking for. This means that you need to know who you are targeting, understand what interests this or that person and, accordingly, offer him the most suitable products. It is also important to understand that as the same person interacts with your business, his interests and preferences may change. This means that you need to be prepared for this. Automatic user data management, which is offered by modern Customer Data Platforms, will help to ensure this with high efficiency.

This technique should be used in practice even if you want to launch equally favorable conditions for your entire audience. Even the most attractive, but universal offer will not work in practice as well as a less favorable discount, but from a favorite brand or from a preferred category. Thanks to the automatic processing of information from various sources, the possibility of flexible segmentation of the customer base, you can easily set up personalized mailings, offering your customers what they really need and what they are likely to want to buy. And this is one of the secrets of successful business development in the online environment.

How does personalization of offers help online stores increase sales?

Now we will try to demonstrate all the theory that we have given above in practice. In particular, we will consider specific examples of how a real business, by launching personalized mailings prepared on the basis of comprehensive customer data management, managed not only to increase the level of income, but also significantly improve the ROI indicators of marketing campaigns. According to the results of a number of studies, it was possible to find out that the use of this solution in practice provides an average increase in revenue by 10-15%, and business profitability increases by 15-30%. And these are not empty words. Here are some illustrative examples:

1. Lamoda and its decision to set up personal ranking of products directly on the main page of the catalog. In this case, we are talking about a site that presents over 600,000 product items. It is clear that one person will not be able to study them all physically, at least within certain time frames. Even using filters will not help to simplify this work significantly, since each category contains thousands of items, most of which will not match the taste of a particular person. Thus, in order to stimulate the user to make a purchase, the platform began to rely on the individual preferences of the buyer and offer him from the first page those items that may interest him most. That is, each visitor to this marketplace is offered a unique search on the main page based on his previous experience. These can be browsing histories, purchases, favorite brands, styles, optimal price range, color preferences in clothes. Statistics show that already in the first year of launching such a project, the platform managed to increase net turnover by more than 132 billion rubles, namely by about 30% compared to the previous reporting period. And a significant role here was played by personalization in ranking the catalog based on the previous activities of a particular person.
2. Labyrinth and their notifications about the arrival of goods to the warehouse, added to the cart or viewed earlier. If anyone does not know, now we are talking about an online bookstore. So, the site began to collect data on its customers, analyze their behavior on the site, thereby identifying the books that this or that person was interested in, added them to the cart or simply viewed. For the most part, this solution was aimed at informing about those books that were not currently available in the product catalog. As a result, as soon as they appeared on sale, the system automatically sent a corresponding notification to these customers, informing them that they can already place an order for the book they liked. Thanks to this, they also managed to significantly increase sales figures and their own income.
3. Sakurahada and its personalized trigger mailings based on behavioral factors. Here we are talking about an online store of original Japanese cosmetics and household chemicals. One of the truly correct and promising decisions of the company's management was the use of automation of e-mailing using trigger technology and CDP. Initially, several scenarios were developed here, which were based on the behavioral factors of buyers. In particular, it was envisaged to divide customers into separate groups: those who last placed an order more than 3 months ago, those who added products to the cart but never completed the purchase, birthday people. Accordingly, all this was aimed at reactivating customers, reminding them of an abandoned cart, offering a personal discount in honor of a special date. Separately, once every 2 weeks, an e-mail newsletter was sent with digests of articles from the blog, drawing attention to new products, useful information on the use of products, etc. Thanks to detailed development, the letters for the e-mail newsletter turned out to be quite organic, unobtrusive. Therefore, the audience responded as positively as possible to such mailings, even if they received them quite often. As a result, revenue from such email marketing increased by more than 11%, and the ROI by approximately 1.5%.
4. Cooper and his personal discounts, selections. This is a service specializing in home delivery of products. Here, previous customer orders were analyzed automatically, and then, based on the information received, a mailing was sent with personal discounts directly on favorite items. This allowed to significantly increase sales figures, since now it was about the category of products that this person had already ordered, that is, he could be sure of its quality, compliance with personal requests. The fact is that many people take a simpler path: why look for something new, uncertain, risk money if you don’t like such products? You can opt for a win-win option.

Of course, today there are a huge number of other online stores that have begun to use customer data management in their practice, but even these examples will be enough to be convinced of the effectiveness and reliability of this method, as well as to make an appropriate and balanced decision about the need to implement it within the framework of your business.

Recommendations for using CDP: increasing the efficiency of work

To ensure that the entire process of user data management, including on the basis of advanced modern tools, such as the same CDP, use a number of recommendations:

• Develop personalized content. Modern consumers have significantly changed their preferences and attitudes towards online sales in general. In particular, they pay serious attention to communication with the brand. Among other things, it can manifest itself in the preparation of personalized offers. Thus, studies show that over 70% of customers choose brands that offer them an additional discount, a gift or something else, but only to them. This is what pushes them to subsequent interaction and order placement. That is, you need to initially think about what exactly you can interest not just your audience, but each individual buyer.
• Regular replenishment of the customer base. It is clear that not every person who visits your site will immediately decide to leave you personal information about themselves, such as an email address, contact phone number or other data. But if you offer them bonuses or discount coupons for this, including through standard subscription forms, then with a high degree of probability you will still receive the desired information, and the person will give it to you himself. This means that subsequently your mailing will not cause him discontent, indignation. That is, think about how you can stimulate the audience to provide information that will replenish your customer base. How can you motivate her? If you carefully analyze your business, pay attention to the general portrait of the target audience, you will certainly find a suitable solution.
• Never forget about abandoned carts. This is your chance to re-attract the audience's attention to your products and make people complete their order. Using CDP in practice, you can send trigger mailings based on certain events, actions of a specific person. In some cases, a simple reminder about an abandoned cart is enough for the buyer to return to your site again and place an order. In parallel with the reminder itself, you can offer additional or similar items, increasing your chances of interesting people. Practice shows that by means of such an unobtrusive reminder, it is possible to sell not only the product left in the cart, but also additional products, such as an option from the same manufacturer. Let's say the buyer was interested in Nivea day cream for skin 35+. She added it to the cart, but did not place an order. That is, you can remind her about this, but at the same time show her that you also have a night cream from the same series in your catalog, as well as an eye cream. Most likely, she will buy the entire line.
• Make it a habit to cross-sell and upsell based on user data. In particular, we are talking about methods that should be in service of most modern businesses. In particular, we have already given an example of cross-selling above, talking about the line of creams from the Nivea brand. That is, here we are talking about selling goods or services in addition to other purchased products. But upselling is an offer to buy a more expensive product instead of the one that was originally chosen by the buyer. To decide on such, let's say, not entirely attractive at first glance offer, providing an additional discount will help. With a high degree of probability, even if the final price turns out to be higher than the initially chosen cheap item, the person will still buy a more expensive product, since they will consider such an offer more profitable. Alternatively, instead of the same Nivea cream, you can offer products from the Vichy line. That is, both the first and second methods are aimed at increasing the average purchase check. And it doesn't matter whether you persuaded the buyer to buy an additional item or choose a more expensive product, the result will be the same: your store will receive a higher profit. Classic combo offers, which are widely offered by pizzerias and other catering establishments today - this is another striking example of cross-selling.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that all these technologies are gradually transforming, changing, adapting to current market trends. However, they are all based on the analysis of user data. Without this, you will not be able to prepare personalized offers for your audience, and, as a result, really interest them, stimulate subsequent interaction.

Otherwise, you just need to improve, develop, try different theories, practices. As an option, working on completing a purchase according to the abandoned cart scenario, most likely, one email newsletter will not be enough for you. With a high degree of probability, you will need at least 2 or even 3 letters of different content, one of which must necessarily contain information about a price reduction on the item you like or its addition to the sale. Statistics show that the Open Rate of such letters reaches 40%, while the conversion to purchase increases by about 6%. These figures are more than impressive. And it is noteworthy that you will not have to make excessive efforts to achieve them. All you need to do is collect information about your audience using automated solutions, develop a number of scenarios depending on the behavior of the audience, and then launch a trigger mailing, which is also automated, by the way.

Important information about customer data management for online stores

If you have your own online store or are working on promoting such sites, want to ensure a stable flow of orders, increase the level of satisfaction from customers, get good reviews and recommendations, do not miss the opportunities that customer data management and CDP systems offer you, in particular. With their help, you get:

1. Automation of the process of collecting, synchronizing data, as well as constantly maintaining its relevance in the database. Based on the data received, you can create the most personalized and accurate offers, thereby increasing conversion.
2. Repeat sales rates will be significantly increased, which is also due to the unique capabilities of the CDP. Here we are talking about the formation of a single customer profile, ensuring targeted personalization, omnichannel, automation of communications.
3. The ability to launch ranking of positions directly in the product catalog, taking into account the personal interests and preferences of a particular buyer. You can also launch a mailing containing personal selections with discounts, set up trigger mailings, notify about the arrival of the products that the person was interested in at the warehouse. It is convenient that you can additionally use personalization based on a person's behavior on the site.

To scale the effect in this case, use the recommendations that we gave in the previous block, in particular, pay special attention to the preparation of personalized content, recommendation materials. Also regularly replenish the customer base, do not ignore abandoned carts, experiment with launching cross-selling and upselling. These are the actions that will give truly amazing results in practice and make your online store extremely popular among the user audience.

Let's summarize

Stable and effective business development is what requires from its manager and directly performers the most comprehensive multi-faceted approach, as well as the use of a set of various modern methods, tools, techniques. All this will greatly simplify the solution of upcoming tasks, speed them up, and largely automate them. But, unfortunately, modern search engines, social networks, and many other sites react extremely negatively to the use of certain methods, including multi-accounting, automated actions. This means that it is in your interests to hide their use.

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