Have you ever heard about ecommerce predictive analytics?
If you have, do you know what it is?
These are simple questions, but they are fundamental to the success of your business. If you have not heard about predictive analytics in ecommerce or do not know much about it, it means you are probably missing out on loyal customers and revenue.
Learn more about what ecommerce predictive analytics is, its benefits and challenges, and how you can get started.
What is Ecommerce Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is an analytical model that analyzes current and historical data about customers and sales to forecast future possibilities. To identify the patterns and the likelihood of future trends, predictive analytics employs tools and techniques such as data mining, data modeling, and artificial intelligence.
This model can empower commerce businesses for the future as it allows them to be proactive in making decisions, planning, and implementing new measures ahead of time.
An example of predictive analytics in ecommerce is the forecast of necessary inventory for a specific season of the year. Historical information about client behavior and sold products can show a pattern in the preferences of customers, which in turn helps predict the expected demand for the following year. This proactive approach has a significant impact on efficient resource management.
Furthermore, predictive analytics is used as a marketing tool. Sorting the behavior patterns and preferences of customers helps create tailored content for segmented groups of customers.
Benefits of Ecommerce Predictive Analytics
Of the 4 main analytical models, predictive analytics stands out as a very powerful tool for business growth. Its capacity to methodically analyze and structure past and current data to establish the likelihood of future customer actions gives you valuable customer insights and helps you manage your online store efficiently.
Here are the key areas in which predictive analytics contributes to business growth.
Increased Customer Retention
Customer retention can be improved using predictive analytics because as you understand customer behavior, you can create personalized experiences.
The predictive analytics model gives you insight into what motivates the customers, their pain points, and their patterns. That can help you predict your customers’ lifetime value (and focus your effort where the best outcomes are), get ahead of churn rates, and create tailored offers and recommendations by predicting what the customers are likely to buy at a specific time.
Altogether, you create a unique customer experience, increasing satisfaction and, thus, loyalty.
Improved Decision Making
The more you know, the better your business decisions are. And that is what happens when you use predictive analytics in your online store.
Rather than make intuitions or decisions based solely or mainly on the maximization of profit, you make data-driven decisions, which means that you use valuable information about your customer’s behavior to create efficient strategies and increased revenue. That information goes from product trends to customer preferences and patterns.
Optimized Inventory Management
One of the most challenging tasks in managing an online business is keeping the inventory at optimal levels. Unbalanced inventory management can make you lose a lot of money and puts your business at risk. Predictive analytics can help here too.
Factors like weather, holidays, and trends dictate the purchases of many customers. Predictive analytics uses this information to make your business thrive. By using data from customers’ purchase history, this technology forecasts the demand for highly sought products and helps you make smarter financial decisions.
Predictive analytics can thus aid you in planning your inventory efficiently by avoiding or reducing stockouts and improving resource allocation (shipping costs, labor time, and warehouse space).
Improved Advertising Strategies
Having an idea of what customers might be looking to buy also helps you develop improved advertising strategies.
The data collected on customer preferences and behavior allows you to optimize your targeting, making your tailored ads more effective and, thus, increasing your ROI. Additionally, it boosts customer engagement and, ultimately, customer conversion through personalized messages and offers.
Challenges of Predictive Analytics
Despite the significant benefits of ecommerce predictive analytics, there are also some challenges to consider before diving into the technology.
Data Quality
Ecommerce generates a wealth of data, but not every bit of it is valuable. And that is a factor that can undermine the accuracy of the forecasts of predictive analytics in ecommerce.
If the analytical algorithms work with inconsistent, outdated, or incomplete data, the outcome is understandably compromised and cannot lead to good data-driven decisions.
Difficulty of Implementation
Predictive analytics is a complex technology. A smooth and uncomplicated implementation usually depends on technical expertise, which can be a barrier to most online businesses.
Moreover, implementing ecommerce predictive analytics can require significant changes to the already existing systems and processes, which is a time-consuming task that involves a high amount of resources (investment in software, hardware, and labor) and, again, technical expertise. l
How to Get Started
Implementing predictive analytics can seem intimidating. It is no walk in the park, surely, but the value it brings to your online store is worth the effort.
To make the process easier, here are a few steps that can help you get started.
Set your goals
What do you want? And how can ecommerce predictive analytics help you achieve it?
Defining your goals and clarifying the role of predictive analytics in your business is the first part of implementing this technology.
Identify your pain points and determine how this model of analytics can make a difference in your business. Keep in mind important factors such as your budget and expert labor.
Assess and prepare your data
Analyze the quantity and quality of the data generated by your online store and determine if it can tackle the issues you found in the previous step. Then, prepare it by eliminating inconsistent and irrelevant information and changing it into a format that can be used by predictive analytics models.
Build a model
With your goals set and data ready, it is time to select the best-suited model to answer your business needs.
Choose a random but relevant dataset to train the algorithm and build a predictive model.
Evaluate your model
In this stage, you evaluate the developed model.
Integrate the model into your systems and monitor its performance to make sure it can produce the necessary outcomes to solve the pain points you identified at the beginning of the process.
Recap
Ecommerce predictive analytics is a highly beneficial analytics model. It can increase customer retention, improve decision-making, optimize inventory management, and enhance advertising strategies.
However, because it is a complex process, it comes with a few challenges, such as the complexity of implementation, and data quality issues.
Considering the powerful effect of predictive analytics in ecommerce, implementing it is necessary. The first steps of the process are setting your goals, assessing and preparing your data, and building and evaluating a suited model.