How Real-Time Analytics Impact eCommerce

The Digital Essentials, Part 3

Developing a robust digital strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Part 3 of the Digital Essentials guide series explores five of the essential technology-driven experiences customers expect, which you may be missing or not fully utilizing.

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While connected content and commerce systems can provide the tools to engage customers, you must also have access to the customer insights that will allow you to decide where and how to optimize your existing digital strategy. Generic segmentation and persona-based marketing have been the standard tactics for the past few years, but the bar has been raised.
Today’s customers require a higher level of personalization and engagement in order to secure their loyalty. These personalized experiences can only be delivered via customer insights that are based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative sources. This knowledge is not just used for targeted marketing; it can also be leveraged to anticipate customer needs and provide the right interaction at the right time on the right channel.
Using real-time analytics allows you to deliver on this much-needed personalized experience. With real-time analytics, you can experiment with different content, layouts, and offerings to provide the most ROI, while also identifying any issues before they become much bigger problems.
Are you interested in moving some elements around on your home page? Set up A/B testing to see if the new layout increases or decreases purchases. Real-time analytics are also what makes it possible to serve up recommendations based on a user’s current activity on the site (“You may also be interested in…”), or arrange news stories on a home page based on what’s most popular at that moment.
Artificial intelligence can also play in the real-time analytics game. The goal is that it will one day make content and layout decisions like the ones above, autonomously, without any human interaction. And this goal is becoming a reality. In its study, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Big Data and IoT,” Mind Commerce estimates that the predictive analytics market will reach $18.5 billion by 2021.
To learn more about how data and other top trends are impacting eCommerce, download our guide, Innovating eCommerce: Nine Top Trends for 2017.