Ecommerce marketing

Effectively using the wealth of information at your fingertips is key to growing your e-commerce business.

We recently wrote about how smart e-commerce operators can optimize performance, improve their interface – and ultimately increase their bottom line – by making the most of visitor data. But visitor data is far from the only option.

In this post, we will highlight four ways e-commerce companies can also better leverage third-party data to enhance customer satisfaction and marketing effectiveness and grow their business.

Data Management Platforms

Looking to reach more of the people most likely to become your customers? Data management platforms (DMPs) can help.

Over the last few years, DMPs have become popular with marketers as a way to understand their audience and extend the reach of their campaigns. At their simplest, DMPs aggregate data on the interests, behavior and demographics of users across a network of publishers. They then integrate that information with your company’s own user data to identify the type of users who will convert best on your site – which allows you to then target more similar users across affiliated ad networks.

Demand Forecasting and Dynamic Pricing

Continuous, real-time price updates have become the new competitive reality in the world of e-commerce. And while this move has been embraced by many top online retailers, smaller online merchants are struggling to keep up.

A system that analyzes how price – along with many other factors – affects click-through rates for different merchants selling the same product can effectively forecast demand at different price points. Such a model can, for example, enable merchants to dynamically offer a coupon based on current market conditions that will maximize their total margin for a given product or move a certain number of units over a given period of time.

Wize Commerce also helps retailer’s leverage external pricing and demand data through our Radar price alert platform. Whether through the use of Sillhouette, a widget on your site, or as part of our standard Radar email marketing campaigns, we can help you reach highly-qualified customers who have already expressed interest in buying your products but are waiting for the right price.

High-Quality Content

As a marketer or e-commerce site operator, you know that good content helps attract and convert users. For a retailer, content can be anything above and beyond basic product and price info, such as quality names and descriptions, product reviews, videos, or recommendations – and there are a number of third-party data providers looking to sell this type of content to enrich your commerce site.

At Wize Commerce, not only do we integrate data from third party providers, we have developed our own proprietary content platform, which includes content like:

• High quality product names and attributes optimized based on consumer shopping behavior
• Structured product relationships, such as related product models, product lines, etc.
• Proprietary product ratings and review extracts based on aggregating and analyzing millions of product reviews across the web
• Personalized product recommendations based on analyzing consumer behavior on our network of shopping sites

Social Data

Nearly every commerce site now has some form of integration with at least one social network like Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter. But many sites simply create buttons to make it easy for users to share their favorite products with friends, and leave it at that.

While this simple level of social integration is often helpful in building awareness and driving traffic, few retailers are taking the next step and leveraging this wealth of social data about their products to improve the shopping experience on their own sites.

At Wize Commerce, we analyze consumer behavior on our global network of high-volume shopping sites to create dynamic, personalized product recommendations. With the right tools, merchants, too, can harness product-level social data from Facebook, Twitter and other sources to enhance the shopping experience for their customers.

Our Radar price alert platform helps our merchant customers use email and onsite notifications to reach highly-qualified customers who have expressed interest in buying your products but are waiting for a lower price

We also help retailers display social context and trends in their product listings (e.g. “#3 most tweeted Television”), incorporate social signals (e.g. number of recent likes and tweets) into search ranking algorithms, and develop onsite and email content pushes of the hottest trending products.

The bottom line is that all e-commerce companies will need to learn how to better utilize and manage third-party audience data if they hope to keep up and stay relevant.

Wize Commerce has extensive experience doing precisely that, and we are continually experimenting with how best to leverage such data to help our merchant partners reach more qualified customers.

So, as you consider how to better leverage this data to grow your business, we encourage you to contact us to start a conversation about how we can help.