When it comes to driving customer engagement, conversions, sales, and brand loyalty in today’s highly competitive ecommerce space, data analytics has never been more important. By collecting and analyzing data from different stages in the customer journey, you can learn more about your audience: who they are, what products they like, what motivates them, and much more.
Perhaps the most critical stage of the online shopping experience is checkout, because this is where shoppers are statistically most likely to drop off. Collecting granular data around your website’s orders, sales, returns, and abandoned carts can help you better understand your customers. This data can ultimately help you make more strategic decisions in areas like launching marketing campaigns and revamping the user experience (UX).
By implementing Buy with Prime on your ecommerce site, you not only simplify the checkout process for Prime members, but also gain access to customer and order data, including email addresses, that can provide a clearer picture of your customers. This data, found in the Buy with Prime merchant console, can be transformed into actionable insights, which can be used to deliver a more personalized online shopping experience, increase engagement through remarketing campaigns, and provide customer service. Learn more about Buy with Prime information handling.
A/B testing to collect data
Before we get into the benefits of using Buy with Prime order data, one proven tactic of using data to identify ways to enhance the UX on your site is ongoing, iterative testing. Think of your online store as a flower, and testing as the water that keeps it healthy and growing.
Using data collected through Buy with Prime analytics, along with other data tools like Google Analytics, you can identify patterns that inspire updates to your customer experience. For example, you can learn the volume of customers dropping off at checkout, which products are driving sales, and the impact your discounts and promotions are having on margins.
Whenever you’re tweaking the UX design of your site, test one version (Group A) against another version (Group B) over a specific period of time to see which one performs better. This approach can be applied to checkout flow, page layouts, font colors and sizes, calls to action, product descriptions, images, marketing emails, discounts and promotions, and much more. The results from these tests help improve your understanding of the shopper journey on your site, which can inform strategic decisions moving forward.
Learn more about proviing the value of Buy with Prime using A/B testing.
Building customer segments
For most online stores, their target audience is made up of numerous customer types, covering a wide range of ages, geographic locations, occupations, challenges, intentions, and expectations. If the goal is to deliver a personalized shopping experience that appeals to each buyer, the first step is breaking down your customer base into segments.
Each segment should be represented with a buyer persona, essentially a fictionalized version of an ideal customer, that encapsulates all relevant facts and insights about the types of buyers. The user data collected at checkout can help you accurately define and refine these personas.
Once you’ve created and aligned your team on your customer segments, you can start experimenting with a UX and marketing strategies that are personalized to each persona. With the evolution of machine learning and AI, you can even automate personalized experiences for different types of visitors to guide them through the conversion funnel.
Streamlining your checkout flow
In today’s ecommerce climate, roughly 80% of all shopping carts are abandoned. There are many reasons that shoppers drop off, but the most common are high shipping costs, slow delivery times, and a complex checkout process—all of which can be addressed by adding Buy with Prime to your ecommerce site.
When it comes to streamlining your checkout flow, analyzing behavioral data can help you answer some critical questions: Which buyer personas are most frequently abandoning their carts? At which step are they most commonly dropping off? Which seasons, months, days of the week, and hours of the day are showing the most conversions or abandonments? How many first-time shoppers return for a second, third, and fourth purchase?
With greater insights into customer activity at checkout, you can follow the data and make UX updates for a faster, easier, and more reliable purchasing experience for your customers.
Optimizing marketing campaigns
The data extracted from your checkout page can be leveraged to improve the customer journey before and after the checkout experience. With the power of data and AI, personalized marketing and advertising campaigns put the right products in front of the right people, at the right time.
For example, a first-time site visitor who abandons a cart filled with hot sauce products can be remarketed to the next time your brand offers a discount on hot sauce. This can come in the form of tailored marketing emails, SMS, social media ads, and pop ups. Considering that this customer has already shown an interest in your brand’s hot sauce, you can assume that they’re more likely to convert than other shoppers.
Your marketing team can access Buy with Prime customer email addresses in the merchant console. They can identify one-time shoppers to remarket to in future outreach campaigns, and hopefully turn them into loyal customers.
According to a 2020 survey by Adobe, 89% of marketers experienced a positive ROI from executing personalized campaigns—and one of the most effective campaigns is email follow-ups for abandoned carts. While the average email open rate sits at about only 18%, industry estimates show that open rates for emails sent following cart abandonment are closer to 45%. Bottom line: Set up a personalized, automated email campaign to help increase conversions. In fact, set up two similar campaigns, and then A/B test them!
If you don’t already have an email marketing provider, learn about the Klaviyo for Buy with Prime app.
In addition to enhancing the checkout and delivery experiences for Prime members on your ecommerce site, Buy with Prime gives you access to crucial data that can help you better understand, serve, and grow your customer base. With ever-changing consumer expectations and increased competition for shopper attention, personalizing your UX and marketing campaigns—powered by analytics and rigorous testing—is key to unlocking the full potential of your online business.
Learn more about Buy with Prime and sign up today.
If you’re looking for an agency to assist you with growing your ecommerce business, check out Codal’s solutions.
This is a contributed article written by Gibson Toombs, a technical writer at Codal, a Buy with Prime Partner.