Business analytics (or data analytics - whatever you choose to call it ) can be a daunting subject, especially for businesses that don’t have a dedicated analytics team member. This week we want to provide a few suggestions for how you can quickly incorporate business analytics into your marketing strategy to increase customer engagement and sales.

A little bit about who we are: ReconInsight is a business analytics software and services company whose tool, Ri360, helps with all the things we list below. As always, we will provide general recommendations as well as specific ways to accomplish these business analytics actions in Ri360.

For the purposes of this post, we’ve chosen to focus on an eCommerce use case. The data you see presented in the screenshots of Ri360 is pulled from an integration with the eCommerce platform, X-Cart. It is worth noting that Ri360 can integrate with any eCommerce platform. Request a complimentary consultation.

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#1 Identify customer hot spots based on location - target that area for advertising, mailers, tradeshows, or events.

Make informed decisions on where you should focus your marketing efforts for your existing customer base and identify areas for growth. Start by visualizing your entire customer base, and then find other ways to segment the data. Such as, most profitable customers, customers based on last order date, and more.

Learn more about Ri360’s map visualization feature.

#2 Identify your ‘best’ customers for a targeted email campaign

Deciding what qualifies as your ‘best’ customers can be a subjective thing. For this example, we are focusing on the months since a customer’s last order (specifically 4-6 months and 7-9 months), how large the bucket of customers is, and (most importantly) how much these customers have spent.

In this example, Ri360 is only integrated with the eCommerce platform. It can also be integrated with your marketing platform, but in the case that it isn’t you can easily export the list of customers from Ri360 and import into your marketing platform.

Once your customer segment has been added to your marketing platform, create a targeted email campaign thanking your top customers. You can also choose to include a special discount code - which will automatically track in Ri360 to see how it performs. As you make sales, pay attention to the performance of the code, but also how your sales trend compared to previous months and years.

#3 Re-Engage your ‘MIA’ customers with a targeted campaign

Using the same report as above, we can also choose to focus on customers that haven’t purchased from us in recent months. You can pull lists from all three groupings: e) 10 to 12, f) 13 to 24, and g) more than 24. Export lists from Ri360, and import the lists into your email marketing platform to create a focused ‘We’ve missed you’ campaign to encourage customers to return to your store.

Track results in Ri360 by using a special coupon code for the campaign and see how it performs.

#4 Promote products in your email marketing and track sales - are they increasing?

Test your market with strategic product-centric emails. You can approach product marketing from a variety of angles using business analytics. A few ways to utilize product analytics for your email marketing strategy:

• Promote your most popular products and see if sales increase

• Promote ‘forgotten’ products that are sitting in inventory

• Segment your customers based on what products they purchased that would need to be re-purchased at some point, send targeted coupon codes to those who would be due to re-purchase their product

If you use Ri360 integrated with an eCommerce store, you can track the success of your email campaigns using coupon codes. You can also choose to integrate Ri360 with your email marketing platform to create direct correlations between email performance and coupon performance.

#5 Compare and contrast campaigns to identify where you have found success

Finding the best marketing strategies and techniques for your customer base requires regular oversight and review of how your campaigns are performing.

We always recommend establishing some clear ROI measures prior to starting strategic marketing campaigns, but sometimes it may require a bit of trial and error to understand what are realistic returns you can expect.

Ri360’s trend reports are great tools to use when establishing the success of a campaign. Align your coupon codes with your specific campaigns and see how they perform over time.

Keep in mind it isn’t just how much you sold that matters, pay attention to how many people you reached in your campaign, how many made purchases. In Ri360 you can drill into Data Levels with a few clicks to understand what products were purchased, how many customers used the coupon, and more.

Final Thoughts

Marketing can have many goals - increase brand awareness, increase sales. When you add business analytics to your marketing efforts, you also enable your business to identify creative ways to approach your marketing, know where you have success, where you don’t, and be more efficient with your marketing campaigns and decisions over time.

Have you tried any of these business analytics strategies with your marketing? Let us know if you have, or will, and if they work for you!