As an online store owner, you’ve got a powerful resource to improve your sales — data from your website. Your online store is a goldmine of valuable data about:
- Sales
- Customer behavior
- Website performance
However, only 47% of industries use data analytics to improve sales. That means more than half of businesses are missing out on the benefits of sales data analysis. You don’t want to do that.
Just capturing data doesn’t result in better business decisions. You need to analyze and monitor your data. For that, you need data tools.
Let’s see what data tools are and how they help you get a better understanding of your business.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Data Analytics 101
- Data Tools To Improve Your Sales Performance
- Final Thoughts: Using Data Tools and Sales Data Analysis To Improve Sales
Data Analytics 101
Online stores have the power to track every activity on the website. You just need to collect and analyze this data to derive valuable insights into your business. For example, sales data analysis tells you which products sell well and which don’t.
Through data analysis, you’ll also get additional insights such as:
- Performance of your business over time
- Customer attrition points
- Speed and usability of your website
Data analytics also help you create a data-driven sales strategy. Invesp Corp’s survey shows 87% of marketers believe data is the most underutilized resource in their business. They are not wrong. With the right data tools, you'll bring about a phenomenal improvement in your sales.
Let’s take a look at the significant ecommerce data tools.
Data Tools To Improve Your Sales Performance
Your data is just numbers if you don’t derive insights from it. For effective data analysis, you should first choose what data types to capture. Next, you should choose the right data analytics tools to monitor and interpret your data.
Data analytics tools give you actionable insights, and you can use them to:
- Understand sales trends
- Predict future sales
- Fine-tune sales processes
- Understand customer behavior
Let’s look at the main data tools available for your online store. We’ll also explore tools available in Nexcess’ StoreBuilder.
Tools for Sales Data Analysis
Without a doubt, steady sales are the biggest goal of every ecommerce business. Hence, it’s crucial to perform sales analytics to understand your selling patterns. Sales data analysis informs you about the following:
- Top selling products
- Underselling products
- Sales trends
- The peak time of sales
To visualize these, you need the right data tools. For example, HubSpot and Salesforce provide customer relationship management (CRM) tools to monitor and analyze sales data.
If you’re a Nexcess customer with a fully managed WordPress ecommerce solutions, you have the Sales Performance Monitor. It’s an excellent tool for sales data analysis that monitors your store’s sales and measures it against a predicted model.
The Sales Performance Monitor will alert you if your sales degrade compared to the historical data. Thus, it keeps you informed about the health of your online store revenue.
Data Tools To Analyze Customer Data
Monitoring and capturing customer data is crucial to improving your sales. Understanding the customer’s behavior helps you with:
- Creating personalized marketing campaigns
- Upselling and cross-selling
- Customer retention
Your online store can collect different types of customer data. Let’s look at important customer behavior data worth analyzing.
Analysis of Cart Abandonment Data
The Baymard Institute reports that the average ecommerce cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. That means more than half of your customers never finish their purchase. Hence it’s essential to capture and analyze the cart abandonment data.
Once you have this data, you can take steps to recover these carts, i.e., urge your customers to finish their purchases.
Companies like Keptify offer cart abandonment tools. Nexcess has partnered with Recapture to enable WooCommerce store owners to detect and recover abandoned carts. If you’re a Nexcess customer, you can access the abandoned cart recovery tool.
Customer Review Management Tools
Customer reviews are essential for the success of your business. You can use its built-in commenting system for customer reviews if you have a WordPress-based business. But, to hit your sales goals, you also need to analyze customer reviews.
Data tools help you manage customer reviews by:
- Enabling/ disabling customer reviews
- Allowing only verified owners to leave reviews
- Enabling star ratings and making them mandatory
There are several WooCommerce plugins for managing customer reviews, such as Ultimate Reviews and YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews.
Nexcess provides you with the Better Reviews for WooCommerce tool to help you monitor and analyze customer reviews and boost revenue.
All-in-One Data Analytics Tools for Businesses
You’ve seen how standalone tools help you perform data analytics. But if you want to capture all your data with a single tool, you should go for comprehensive data analytic tools for your business.
Glew is a popular business intelligence tool for WooCommerce store owners. Glew helps sales teams capture a wide range of data for sales analysis. That includes several key performance indicators (KPIs) like:
- Revenue
- Product sales
- Gross profit
- Average order value
- Conversion Rate
If you have a WooCommerce store managed by Nexcess, you’ll get Glew as a part of the StoreBuilder tool.
Performance Monitoring and Testing Tools
Along with sales data analysis, you also need to analyze the speed and performance of your website. These metrics influence customer experience and have a significant role in your sales growth.
Here are a few factors that could affect the speed of your website:
- Cheap hosting
- Heavy graphics and images
- Outdated templates
- Plugins and widgets
Among these, plugins are crucial for an online store. Slow loading plugins can affect the functionality of your website. Therefore, you should use a tool that measures the performance of your website before and after installing a plugin. It’ll help you detect if any plugin is slowing your website.
If you use fully managed WooCommerce hosting by Nexcess, you’ll get access to the Plugin Performance Monitor tool. Here’s how you can use it to test the speed of your website.
To ensure your website’s health and usability, you also need to test your website constantly. If you perform manual tests in real time, it might disrupt your services. Automation of website testing is crucial for online stores.
Nexcess provides built-in automated testing for WooCommerce stores. This feature covers the top ecommerce website testing test cases, such as adding an item to your cart and checking out. Here’s how it works:
Final Thoughts: Using Data Tools and Sales Data Analysis To Improve Sales
Data is a powerful resource you can use to improve sales. Sales data analysis can identify issues with sales and facilitate revenue growth. Moreover, the analysis of customer behavior helps you create personalized marketing campaigns.
Nexcess Store Builder comes with several data tools to help you with your online store, such as:
- Sales Performance Monitor
- Abandoned cart recovery tool
- Better Reviews for WooCommerce
- Plugin Performance Monitor
- WooCommerce automated testing
To access Nexcess’ data analysis and visualization tools, check out our fully managed WooCommerce hosting today.
