Ordering food online after a long day of working from home? Renewing your streaming television program subscription? Registering yourself for a vital industry conference being held online?
What is common to all of these transactions? The digital component.
The pace at which digitalization was taking place in the world has been hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a short period of time, businesses, academics, entertainment, and personal lives have moved online. According to a Deloitte study, 47% consumers report using at least one free streaming video service supported by ads. One third of respondents said they wouldn’t be comfortable going to live events for six months, and 38% say they tried a new digital activity since the pandemic began.
As social distancing norms continue, digitalization attains greater importance. Even though this shift was enforced by the pandemic, digital media and methods are constantly upgrading and aligning with customer expectations. Customer-focus, simple user interfaces, and easier navigation are key when it comes to meeting customer satisfaction. Payment gateways also matter when it comes to online shopping and payments. Too many complexities at the payment stage can put off customers, leading to cart abandonment or aborted payment.
What does this mean for businesses?
As businesses tread the road to recovery, COVID-19 continues to alter the way they plan and work. For businesses to attract and retain clients and ensure their own sustainability, understanding the digital landscape is especially important. This is where the role of digital analytics comes in. Digital analytics should accompany all digital communication and marketing efforts to help measure and analyze digital efforts. Doing so improves efficiency and identifies areas for improvement.
Digital isn’t just shopping; it is also about customer behavior
Social media platforms and e-commerce sites are important examples of how engagement and interaction have changed. Analytics from social media and other online interactions can provide marketeers and business operators with critical but detailed data about customers and target audiences. Analytics can identify preferences in searching, watching, and sharing details about purchasing requirements and choices. Critical information, such as the customer’s age, geographic location, and purchasing behavior all contribute to better understanding the target audience.
Measuring the performance of your business and customer behavior
You can tangibly measure the overall performance of your online business using analytic tools, reports, and ratios. Digital analytics helps you identify and track the channels that bring in traffic to your business. You can analyze the clicks per visit and the time spent on the site: more engaged the person is on your site, more likely is he/she to make a purchase. Revenue per visitor, cost per conversion, and return on investment are important metrics that give a broad overview of your overall profit margins. The ‘Lead to Close Ratio’ determines how many customers were already in before you missed on them
Understanding and aligning your digital efforts with your customer
Once you measure the customer behavior, it is important to correlate and understand it. The need to better understand your customer is now essential. Marketing needs to focus on consumer behavior – except now the focus has shifted to the online world. Digital analytics can provide information on customer behavior and help identify demographics, location, preferences, and requirements. This information allows companies to align their products, services, and marketing communication to customer expectations, thus ensuring a higher success rate.
Did you advertise your business on the correct channels to being the customers in? Have you noticed how many customers leave your site because they find the navigation cumbersome? How many were frustrated by faulty internet connectivity or inconveniences in completing payments? Does your mobile app have a friendly UI? If people prefer using your business app, are you advertising your products and services clearly and providing a great UX? These and more questions, when answered, can create a rich informative picture on your business’s clientele. This information can be analyzed so that you can improve, streamline, and ensure a memorable user experience.
Enhancing customer experience based on digital analytics
After analyzing and understanding the customer behavior using digital analytics, you need to work on providing an immersive experience to your customers and engage them in targeted scenarios. Using a responsive web design and a great UX for your business app not only enhances the customer’s experience, but also increases your business revenue. These days, customers are most interested in an easy and smooth experience, and with so many options available, there is no reason for them to struggle through a difficult experience. Digital analytics helps you locate the pain points while also providing an enhanced experience to your customers.
Making the relevant choices
Every business, regardless of the industry it operates in, can benefit greatly from setting up a digital presence. Whether it is a website that informs existing and potential customers about your business, or your business mobile app, your focus should be on conducting business transactions online. A digital presence that is responsive, fast, and friendly can easily attract and retain customers. For startups and small businesses not yet well-versed in digital analytics for marketing, a strategic partnership can be very helpful. There are multiple benefits of outsourcing digital expertise: from cost savings, to professional expertise, to proven solutions, a partner helps businesses become immediately productive without the hassle of setting up systems in-house.
At Analytix, we have more than a decade of experience, closely working with startups and small businesses, including increasing digital capabilities and successfully streamlining overall business operations. Email us at sales@analytix.com or call us on 781.503.9002 to find out how we can help you and your business.
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