Analytics are rapidly transforming and Vinod Kumar, eCommerce strategist for Demandware shared some of the highlights from a particular session he attended during the Demandware XChange Conference that covered the evolving usage of analytics within a retail organization, in a blog post. Speakers for the session included Greg Girard of IDC Retail Insights, John Esquire of eCommera, and Cortney Easterwood of Demandware.
Here are some points during the session Kumar highlighted:
- Since consumers are interacting with a brand across a multitude of modes and channels, the new analytics paradigm is becoming more customer centric from the previously product centric model, according to the blog post.
- With the new customer centric model, any measurement is also naturally omni-channel as well. According to the blog post, an estimated 48 million “showrooming” shoppers spent $68 billion during the 2012 holiday season. Retailers are starting to acknowledge this as an irreversible trend and are making plans to embrace as part of their overall consumer engagement strategy instead of creating resistance within their organizations.
- Retailers will need to take multiple take multiple sources of data into consideration to build a comprehensive picture of consumer engagement, including – store analytics, customer analytics, campaign and offer analytics and web analytics.
- here is an importance of segmenting metrics and segmentation is key for analyzing conversion because viewing it as one giant indicator of performance may not be sufficient. Retailers need to think about segmenting ‘conversion’ by product category, traffic segment, consumer demographics.
- Speakers, Kumar said, reiterated the need to make analytics ‘action oriented’ and encouraged merchants to constantly ask the question – “What’s my next best action given the story the numbers are painting?”
- More data doesn’t necessarily equate to more or better insights. Chances are, the data that you need to make more insightful decisions already exist in your systems, it is up to internal teams to identify data that may exist in various silos and bring the information together.
- Go beyond measuring performance in averages to avoid the “misery of averages” segmenting your metrics is a great place to get started.