How to Boost Your Ecommerce Sales Using Market Research
Every ecommerce business that wants to stay ahead of the game must know what customers want. The more information you have, the better you can promote your offerings online. And, nothing beats concrete data when you need to create a successful marketing campaign for your ecommerce business.
This article will give ecommerce business owners a complete blueprint to better understand the expectations of online shoppers and their buying patterns using market research. And when done right, your market research survey will lead to massive business success driven by repeat sales.
How Market Research Survey Helps
Starting an ecommerce business is quick, easy and inexpensive but given the 80% failure rate, making sure that it clears the clutter and stands out is way more challenging than you can imagine. So whether you’ve just launched a new line of products or want to start your own ecommerce business, with market research survey, you can:
- Learn which type of promotional campaigns connect with the audience and have more conversions
- Keep tabs on your target audience and know their in-app purchases to drive more traffic
- Understand online catalog management and list products in a manner that attracts maximum buyers before they change their mind
- Collect data at every touch point and determine purchase preferences to deliver a seamless shopping experience
- Know which products are selling the most and why; so you can devise new campaigns more effectively
- Detect purchase patterns and consumer behavior to generate more sales
- Gain a quantitative and qualitative understanding of what your customers want and why
- Track checkouts and get actionable data directly from the shoppers
- Chat with online shoppers who don’t mind sparing a few minutes to know their specific needs as well as online shopping binges and accordingly change your products and shipping prices
- Track item-wise purchases with demographics and spending levels in your niche to gain a competitive edge
While most ecommerce businesses conduct market research surveys only to drive more traffic, convert more customers, and boost their revenue, the insights you gather from a market research survey allow you to take crucial decisions for a profitable business.
The Role of Market Research Survey in Making Your Ecommerce Business a Big Success
A market research survey will help you better understand the following 4 aspects that ultimately impact your online sales and revenue
- Product – Market research survey will help you understand the needs, wants, and desires of your existing and potential consumers so you can pick and choose the right products for your target audience
- Positioning– Market research will show you how and when to market your products to your target audience so you can maximize your sales
- Pricing –Market research survey also helps you determine competitive product pricing along with shipping charges and additional fees for handling and returns
- Promotions- Market research also reveals which marketing messages are driving your audience to your online store so you can optimize the ones that are working and stop running the ones that are not delivering results.
The more you know your audience, the more likely you are to identify, attract, and convert them into customers who keep coming back to you for more business.
Top 6 Sources of Data for an Ecommerce Business
As competition gets stiffer in the ecommerce sector, market research survey remains the only reliable and efficient way to sustain and succeed in the market. So if you are ready to leverage the actionable insights of market research for business success, then here are the top 6 data sources that you can tap.
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Your Target Audience
Start by asking your existing customers what they want after they have purchased your products so you know what you can do to increase their orders. This data will tell you if you need to improve the product quality, come up with more options, add more features to it or offer more competitive rates.
Ecommerce businesses that cannot invest on professional market research; can still create their own surveys using a free survey marker and gain valuable insights into the buyer’s experience to improve products and services for potential customers. Use this complete step-by-step guide to creating a perfect market research survey and make this process quick, easy and efficient.
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Your Own Employees
Every employee who engages with your existing and potential customers either through adverts, emails, marketing messages, sales, or after sales service should have valuable insights into the needs, expectations, and pain points of your target audience. Do they have any problems with your products? Do they want any upgrades? Are they looking for similar products at a lower pricing? These insights will enable you to improve your online offerings for more leads and ultimately more conversions.
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Email List of Existing and Potential Consumers
The email list of your existing customers that you have generated from signups, registrations, and newsletter subscriptions makes for an excellent marketing tool. You can also make this list a part of your survey when you are planning to sell a new product and seek their suggestions. This will eventually turn your subscribers into customers and also open up the opportunity to follow-up with them after the product is launched.
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Focus Groups that Match Your Target Market Demographics
If you are just starting your ecommerce store and have no customers or employees yet, you can ask focus groups that represent your target audience to see how they will respond to your offerings.You can use social media channels to find people who match the demographics of your target market and ask them to take up your market research survey.
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Credible Data Sources
Public data sources can provide you with a lot of valuable information about your market landscape, competitors, consumer demands, and industry trends. Depending on the types of products you sell online and your budget, you can use any of the following public data sources to know more about your audience:
- Facebook Audience Insights – gives free data about consumers across the globe based on their social profiles and purchase habits
- Alexa Tools – Alexa is a brilliant site to uncover different details about your audience’s buying preferences, interest, and demographics
- Marketing Charts – an exhaustive hub of marketing information, graphs and analyses with paid reports
- Statista – offers free and paid access to more than one million statistics about consumers and online markets
- Google Surveys –one of the best ways to know your target market is by creating Google surveys and Google will pool people to provide you with actionable results
- Net Promoter Score – a simple metric that helps you measure customer loyalty
- Social Mention – gives you a radar on what’s trending in social mentions and on the latest industry trends so you can make the most of mentions in your marketing campaigns
- Comscore – offers free access to data about marketing and online stores
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Online Reviews and Ratings of Top and Trending Products
If you are in the ecommerce industry, you have competitors that are selling very similar products. So the best way to boost your revenue is by using the review section to your advantage. Big online retailers have a section of popular, hot selling products in every category based on their ratings and reviews. These are the exact same products that you should be offering in your online store if you want to maximize your sales and revenue.
Don’t rely on guess work or gut feeling if you want to uncover growth potential. Start your market research today and get the facts you need to win over more customers and grow your business.