A first-time visitor arrives at your tasting room.
Upon their greeting by your friendly and welcoming host, the guest is invited to sit down for a tasting experience. Before the guest agrees, they request to look at a menu of today’s tasting experience offerings.
From there, the consumer quietly converses with their partner, debating whether or not to stay. The guest declines the opportunity to taste.
Then, they leave.
The behavior of the guest implies a great deal about their customer experience. They wanted to visit a winery for a tasting, but chose not to stay for some reason. Maybe they thought that the wines on today’s offerings were not to their liking or were out of their price range and although they’d already made the trek out to your property, they decided that they would have better luck somewhere else.
Unfortunately, the ecommerce customer experience is even harder to understand without the physical event. Unlike your tasting room where your staff can analyze behavior in real time - it’s hard to tell what your customer wants online — and what’s preventing them from getting it.
The ecommerce purchasing pipeline can be full of leaks for your potential customers to drop off. Fortunately, your own data holds a lot of information that can be analyzed to understand behavioral intent and turn your website viewer’s clicks into conversions. But where should you start?
To better understand the customer metrics you should be tracking, you have to determine what questions you want to answer about your ecommerce store's performance. Then, dig into the different data points and what they mean and create a plan for how you’ll integrate this analysis into your and marketing strategies. Once you’re tracking the right data, you can start using the resulting customer insights to inform business decisions and improve acquisition, retention, and customer loyalty for your online store by focusing on the most important metrics, such as website traffic trends.
It is imperative to start by identifying the primary business goal(s) for your analysis, or what questions you are looking to answer. Skipping this step may result in an overwhelming amount of information and inability to hone in on the most important and timely insights.
You can approach this with broad questions, before narrowing down to understand granular details. For example, before a customer places an order or signs up for your Wine Club, they have had a unique journey to get there; so, one question you may want to ask is,
“What is the most common customer journey from awareness to ambassador?”
Using customer analytics, we recommend that you begin to map the customer’s journey, outlining and understanding the steps a user takes from their first trackable interaction with your brand.
Other comprehensive questions you may want to ask are,
Alternatively, you may choose to sift through to finer detail straight away. For example, you may want to dive into specific business goals, such as:
Data points can always be redefined and as your curiosity grows, you can find new opportunities within your data set.
The next step is to dive into the metrics and begin to understand and analyze your customers’ behavior. The breadth and depth of analytics you can collect depends on how many tools and integrations you employ and the amount of data they provide.
Learn about your customer ecommerce experience by looking at a collection of data points that indicate what your customers’ are interacting with, how, and how often. Think about your website and these examples of analytics:
For a larger list of metrics that matter for wineries, checkout our friend Wise Academy’s recent blog post.
These metrics are changing all the time, and some of the factors may be out of your control. It is key to remember that your customers are human, and preferences and priorities are changing often.
The third piece of the process is to integrate the findings of your data analysis and begin testing to see if your findings answer your initial questions and/or satisfy your business goals. Data can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it’s up to you to derive the insights that will change the course of your ecommerce experience and customer base. To start, create a few scenarios to test your findings and improve customer service. We recommend that you focus on low risk, easy to implement measures. Once you begin to understand how your data analysis insights answer some of your questions, you can combine real-time data and customer insights to optimize your ecommerce customer experience.
Here are three data-driven steps to improve the ecommerce experience for your customers, based on your wineries’ unique data:
Throughout your various sales channels, distinct products will perform better or worse in different seasons, or as a result of a trend or influencer endorsement, and these changes may happen fast. Let your data tell you which products are selling the most right now, and use that to acquire new customers or increase conversions through personalized product recommendations.
Leveraging data on your customers can be very powerful when it comes to targeting campaigns and promotions to certain people based on their demographics, purchasing history and preferences. Start off small: look at the data already collected in your CRM to create a segment of your customers based on location and generate a campaign personalized to them, perhaps with a unique shipping offer for that area. By utilizing customer data and segmentation you can assure the right audiences are seeing the messages you want to communicate, improving customer interactions and increasing your conversion performance.
Review your sources of traffic, take a look at how they navigate through your pages, and note where they fall through the cracks. This can all be done easily through Google Analytics. Once you learn where they are dropping off, keep your customers engaged by introducing compelling information, or promotions & discounts to create a sense of urgency to keep your customers moving along until the purchase is complete through a user-friendly checkout process and effective marketing efforts
The data that you possess on your customers is one of your most important assets. This overview demonstrates how harnessing your data is equivalent to holding your customer’s virtual hand through their ecommerce experience, and with you as their personal shopper to influence their decisions along the way.
