Data is the foundation of sound ecommerce business decision making. But data alone is relatively useless.

“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” ~ Daniel Keys Moran

For data to be an effective tool for your business – driving investment, ROI and profitability – it needs be analyzed in reference to your objectives. Consequently, it’s data-driven insights, not data alone, that allows for strategic business planning and revenue growth.

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” ~ Ronald Coase

Gaining Data-Driven Insights

It’s imperative to have best-in-class industry analytic tools to gather robust yet detailed data. But it’s also critical that you have business and data analysts, or implement qualitative interpretive software (I’m still a fan of the former) to gain actionable data-driven insights for your marketing channels and your business as a whole. For example, do you know:

• Which webpages are converting the most visitors and why?
• Which products offer the greatest cross-sell opportunities and where?
• Which tactics (e.g. print ads, SEO, PPC, email) are driving the most qualified traffic to your website and what does the consumer decision making journey touchpoint funnel look like?
• Which email subject lines are resulting in the highest open rates and why?
• How can you optimize your visitors’ journeys to give them exactly what they want as efficiently and digestibly as possible?
• Which value propositions and copy do users find most engaging and compelling and why?
• How much indirect traffic and revenue can be attributed to your mass display brand awareness campaigns?
• Where should you start investing, where should you stop spending and what should you be testing to optimize your marketing mix?

Making use of data-driven insights, not opinions or theories, to make better decisions is by no means a new concept:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the data. It biases the judgment.” ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Room to Grow

That being said, challenges and concerns about a lack of effective data-driven insights are common and marketers are feeling the pressure. According to CMO.com only 40% of marketers think their company's marketing is effective and while more than 75% of marketers believe measurement is important, just 29% believe they’re doing it well. Furthermore, only 44% of marketers say their marketing departments have a great deal of influence over their organizations overall business strategy.

Successful ecommerce companies provide an exceptional, frictionless and positive end-to-end customer experience. To do this, marketing needs the data to interpret to make effective data-driven decisions at every touchpoint of consumers’ decision making journey. Ultimately…

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of

mouth is very powerful.” ~ Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO