If you’re currently running a business and struggling to make the amount of profit you’d like each year or to hire enough staff to help you work less hours and have more regular vacations, it’s important to continually look for ways to grow your business in a smart way.
In this tech-driven world, a good way to go about it is to take advantage of Big Data. It can help you to achieve business growth sooner, in several ways. Read on for some tips you can follow to effectively use analytics in your organization today.
Offer Better Customer Service
Customer service is one of the most important factors involved in making a business a success. When you provide excellent support to clients, not only are they more likely to buy from you to begin with, but they’re also going to be more inclined to shop with you again and to recommend your services to their contacts. As such, if you work on this area, you can grow your business significantly — something which certainly makes Big Data–related training or a complete business analytics degree worth it.
Analytics is helpful in this field because it enables you to better cater to your target market. Use the data you compile about customers to understand who they are as well as when and how they prefer to shop. Then, ensure they’re being interacted with effectively at each touchpoint along the shopping pathway, from the time they first call your business or land on your website to when they place an order and later, when you follow up with them and entice them to buy again.
Use analytics to show you when you need to have the most customer support staff on hand to handle queries and in what avenues you need to focus, such as telephone calls, social media interactions, live chat, emails and so on. Analyze data to learn which questions customers ask repeatedly. This alerts you to information you must make more available on your website, social media pages or advertisements. Analytics is also useful in determining which loyalty rewards and other perks customers are most interested in.
Improve Supply Chain Management
A big area of stress for many entrepreneurs is supply-chain management. It’s tough deciding which products or parts and other supplies to keep in stock at any one time — and in what quantities and when to increase your level of wares or not. Happily, though, Big Data can be utilized to make these kinds of decisions easier.
Data analysis programs can be used to create reports on how much stock-on-hand you have of each good at a time and in what kind of combination, such as color and sizes. It can tell you how many items you have in each category (sometimes you won’t realize you’re concentrating on one or two areas and neglecting others); and it will let you see when you last sold a product and how many you have moved since introducing the line.
Analyze sales histories to find out which items sell best and at what times of the month or year. This will help you stop investing cash into products that don’t move and will ensure you also have enough of the goods people want when they want them, which boosts sales. The money you free up by not stocking slow-moving products can also be invested in testing new product lines.
Less Shopping Cart Abandonment
If you’re operating an ecommerce store, probably one of the biggest pain points when it comes to sales is shopping cart abandonment. While it’s common for people to put items in their online cart but fail to complete the transaction, as a business owner it’s frustrating seeing people interested in goods but not buying them.
Anything you can do to lessen shopping cart abandonment is a good thing for not only your stress levels but also for business growth. If you can get more people to make purchases, even if it only seems a small percentage, such as an additional five percent of shoppers, this leads to extra revenue you can take advantage of.
A high cart abandonment rate can stem from numerous issues with your website and/or its processes. Analytics can help you to identify what these problems are and to test and measure until they’re fixed. For instance, shoppers may find the checkout confusing or too time-consuming, or they might be turned off once they see your returns policy or shipping rates. They may wonder about your firm’s trustworthiness or security levels or be unimpressed by your payment options, to name just a few.
Use analytics to learn whereabouts in the shopping cart potential customers “walk” away. You will be able to see how far along in the process they get before clicking away and if they return to the cart later or not. From here, try changing the layout of your site as well as sending shoppers email enticements or installing pop-overs with incentives for them to complete a transaction. The more you test and measure using this kind of data, the better your outcomes — and sales — will be.
