Our Five Key Points:
- Ecommerce is a crowded market that brings both challenges and opportunities.
- Data integration tools like Integrate.io are now a vital part of any Ecommerce tech stack.
- Business Intelligence tools combined with effective data integration empower businesses to make decisions faster.
- Personalizing communications with customers is easier with complete data.
- Effective data integration can boost your Ecommerce repeat purchase rate.
From Amazon to eBay, Ecommerce is here to stay, not just for B2C businesses but for B2Bs. As more and more companies turn to online providers for a dizzying array of products and services, how do you stay ahead of the competition? If you provide goods to retail consumers, how do you stand out from the crowd in a world of personalized offers and AI-driven chatbots? The answer is all wrapped up in your business data. By collating all your data from its various sources, from social media to sales reports from your Ecommerce platform, you can make the tiny tweaks and wholesale changes to take your Ecommerce business to the next level. Learn how you could be using your data to get ahead in your industry and how an integration tool like Integrate.io empowers you to do more.
Maximize the Effectiveness of Your ERP
Most Ecommerce businesses now run some kind of ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. Your ERP tool uses a range of business data to perform various everyday business tasks such as accounting, inventory management, or creating reports. ERP tools have become more essential as businesses turn to more third-party cloud providers to solve many problems, meaning there are often wildly disparate systems to draw data from. An ERP system uses data from many sources to complete its tasks, so they are only ever as effective as the completeness and integrity of data available.
ERP systems and data integration go hand in hand, so all Ecommerce businesses should ensure they have the right data management tools in their tech stack to optimize what their ERP can do. Integrate.io can connect to many popular ERP tools, plus the many varied systems that provide relevant, real-time data to create the most effective resource planning system possible.
Streamline Your Business Processes
Everything you do as an Ecommerce business requires data. You might need supply chain information from your logistics partners to keep customers updated about shipping timescales. You might need product quality updates from manufacturers you partner with if there have been concerns in that area. You also need to keep track of a range of internal data, from payroll to staff performance.
Effective data integration means you don’t have to load into a separate system every single time you need to find the relevant information. Your data warehouse becomes a single repository for everything pertaining to your business, streamlining all your internal processes, and making you more available to your customers and clients.
Hone Your Content Marketing Strategy
SEO (search engine optimization) is about so much more than picking the right keywords and latching onto the latest trends. Your buyers want to know that you’re the expert in your industry – a trusted authority whose content is meaningful and shareable. How do you know which of your blogs, articles, whitepapers, or ebooks are hitting the spot with consumers, and which are being ignored?
Effective data integration tools like Integrate.io connect effortlessly to your CMS (content management system) via a combination of out-of-the-box integrations and API creation and management. This allows you to bring all the data about your content straight into your data warehouse, where you can explore clickthrough rates, engagement volumes, which affiliate links got the most interest and even user data like where your readers come from.
This allows you to capitalize on the aspects your readers love most, building on those features and creating more easily digestible and popular content for your marketing campaigns. This, in turn, is more likely to turn readers into leads, and leads into sales, increasing your conversion rate. Top tip: video's were the most successful content marketing tool in 2021, so ensuring you have platforms like Instagram linked to your data integration strategy is vital.
Meet Your Customers Wherever They Are
Mobile buying is on the rise. This means your customers need to be able to engage with you wherever they are, so mobile optimization of your online portals is key. The first step is learning how your customers like to engage with you, so you can funnel your budget into the right improvements. This might mean better welcome emails with more relevant products or services included, or making a range of resources available via your blog or website. It might mean setting up a chat function on both your desktop and mobile websites. It may mean focusing more energy on your organization's telephony, for industries with clients who traditionally prefer talking on the phone.
Effective data integration allows you to build your business around your customers’ needs and empowers you to be a business that listens and understands how its customers want to engage.
Improve Communication with Customers
As well as always being available for your busy customers, better business data can help you improve the ways you connect with them. Data analytics isn’t just about sales reports and conversion figures. It allows you to measure other metrics like customer experience, cart abandonment rate, and churn. Learning what makes your customers tick allows you to serve them better, and ensures that when they do engage with you, you have all the relevant information to hand in to encourage them to stick around.
Pricing is rarely one of the most important metrics when it comes to choosing a service provider. This is especially true for B2B buyers, who will normally look for expertise and product knowledge rather than the cheapest option. Customer experience is also an essential factor for all buyers, and Ecommerce businesses know that consumers who have a poor experience will often go elsewhere without preamble. The right data lets you know which email campaigns are effective, which turn customers off your products, and how many customers respond to phone calls, SMS messages, or even via social media. This allows you to craft your communication style carefully to get your brand message across even more effectively.
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Increase Efficiencies
The most competitive businesses tend to be the most efficient. That usually means they provide a simple, streamlined service for consumers, which comes from having access to the right data at the right time. Complete data also allows businesses to automate a range of tasks to make things even easier for both customers and employees of the company.
Complete business data helps organizations work smarter by reducing the amount of manual input required. Having to input names, addresses, and product details onto invoices and purchase orders is massively time-consuming when completed manually. Beyond this, there is always the risk of human error, especially when one team is doing this all day, every day. Having up-to-date consumer details in your CRM via your data integration tools means you can massively cut down how much information needs to be input by hand. This prevents errors such as failed deliveries, naturally increasing your customer satisfaction KPIs.
Learn how Ecommerce data integration increases efficiencies for your business.
Eliminate Data Silos
Data silos are chunks of business data that you simply can’t access or need to access completely separately from the rest of your business systems. Simply put, they’re the opposite of data integration; difficult to access information can make businesses slower, less efficient, or even miss important customer details, making less well-informed decisions.
As well as affecting how your Ecommerce store runs, data silos can impact communication within your business. If your marketing team can’t access figures from your CMS, the next marketing campaign will be missing vital information on how your current content strategy is working. Your sales team might continue plugging a particular product or service because they didn’t have access to a slew of customer complaints about performance issues.
Make sure you have a data integration tool like Integrate.io in your tech stack to eliminate data silos. Even a few relevant tables within an SQL database become accessible via the API tools, allowing you to have the most granular and actionable data possible.
Make Everything Personal
Combining your effectively integrated data with AI and machine learning tools can allow you to truly personalize chatbots, emails, and other points of contact. This allows you to stand out from the competition as a truly connected Ecommerce business that cares about its customers. Of course, on the odd occasion where those points of contact fail, you can still pick up the phone and talk to a disgruntled buyer or a potential lead that just needs a little more information. Having the facility to combine these methods only become possible with carefully curated business data.
Machine learning and AI capabilities are fast becoming integral to business intelligence (BI) tools. Techniques like sentiment analysis skim through “voice of the customer" data such as reviews and comments for insights that can help hone how businesses engage with customers. This type of unstructured data can be gathered and held in data lakes, ready for treatment by tools designed specifically for dealing with this type of data.
Having access to such a large volume of big data allows you to create welcome emails, cart abandonment reminders, and instant messages that are more finely tuned to the customer in question. This could include making offers to a particular demographic of customers that have been popular or widely taken up in the past. It could also mean ensuring follow-up emails include products aimed at a particular target audience or links to carefully curated content for B2B buyers.
Boost Repeat Purchase Rates
The absolute best way to position yourself as a contender in your market is to work on your repeat customer rates. Repeat customers are more likely to spend big with Ecommerce companies. Statistics show that a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to increased profits of anywhere between 25% and 95%.
The good news is that it’s actually more cost-effective to focus on your existing, loyal customers. Of course, you shouldn’t ever stop looking for new leads. But it can cost up to 7 times more to onboard a new customer than to promote a repeat sale with an existing customer.
Fully integrated customer data from your Ecommerce store is vital for boosting your repurchase rate. Using a data integration suite like Integrate.io can tell you what products are popular right now, where sales have dropped off, the demographics buying your products and services, and which aspects of your online business aren’t meeting your customers’ expectations. Combining data integration with data analysis helps you create opportunities for repeat purchases by better understanding customer behavior.
Learn about the importance of your business’s repurchase rate.
Conclusion: Ecommerce Data Integration and Integrate.io
You now know that you need all your business data in one place to get ahead with your Ecommerce business. But what’s the best way to achieve that? By ensuring your tech stack has high-end data management tools, including a compelling data integration suite like Integrate.io. This new ETL (extract, transform, load) platform was built for Ecommerce businesses like yours to allow you to integrate the various PaaS and SaaS you use daily.
The cloud-based IPaaS (integration platform as a service) connects to the most popular e-commerce tools. Out-of-the-box integrations include data pipelines to e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce, plus API creation and management allows you to connect to so many more. This empowers you to drive all your business-critical data into your data warehouse or data lake for storage, cleansing, and optimization, allowing your BI tools to take over. Faster insights can drive business decisions five times faster than businesses that don’t utilize data.
You can automate your most-used data extraction jobs with a super-quick change data capture (CDC) tool. CDC allows you to pull only the most recent changes from a range of Ecommerce tools, maximizing the efficiency of your data warehouse by not having to do a full, historical data load every time. Use reverse ETL capabilities and drive this optimized data to your ERP software and CRM (customer relationship management) tools, building better customer relationships and potentially boosting repeat sales. Complete your tech stack with a data integration tool built for the Ecommerce market. Schedule a demo today to see if Integrate is right for your business.