Head to any website, or interact with any company, and chances are high that they are collecting data from you. Both small and large businesses are doing it.
The data they are collecting is benefiting their businesses. Data-driven insights allow businesses to determine the best way to improve the customer experience, improve sales and establish the best areas to distribute their resources, as even large businesses have limited staff and cash.
Data-driven insights is a huge subject. We can’t cover even a fraction of it here. However, we will give you a brief overview of how data-driven insights are helping to shape decision making in the digital age.
What are data-driven insights?
Data-driven insights are used to achieve a proper analysis of collected data. For instance, a business might analyze who abandons their carts when shopping on their website. They will consider exactly at what point the user is abandoning their cart.
If the data indicates that shoppers are abandoning their carts at roughly the same point in the process, then this data can be used to create a better customer conversion experience. Other data insights may look at which offers convert the best.
Data-driven insights are just an interpretation of collected data.
How data-driven insights can benefit a business
We want to give you an overview of some of the ways that businesses are using data-driven insights to improve their operations. Once again, we must stress that this is not a complete guide to how data-driven insights can work. You could probably write a book on each one of these elements alone.
Analyze business performance
The main aim of data-driven insights is to look at how a business is performing. Both big and small businesses will use their data to determine which ads are converting the best, what their most successful products are and factors such as whether they have a decent conversion rate when somebody lands on their website.
All this data will lead to key decisions throughout the business. For example, some businesses may find that the data doesn’t indicate that certain parts of their business are contributing positively. Others may identify areas that are ripe for potential future investment.
All businesses should be using data-driven insights to improve their decision making. Some companies may not realize they are doing it, but they are. Every company is noting which products are selling the most, which ones aren’t worth it and how their customers react to their brand.
Identify potential business opportunities
Businesses will use their collected data to identify potential business opportunities in the future. For example, they may examine what people are searching for on their website.
In some cases, it may be something the business didn’t expect at all. Other businesses will use external data to analyze future trends in certain markets and try to capitalize on them.
You can see this in big business all the time. When one company enters a potential market, other larger companies are not too far behind. This is because most of them were developing products at the same time, all thanks to data they have collected over the years.
A good 80%+ of CEOs have stated that data-driven insights are vital when it comes to decision making, particularly in the digital space where most customers can be found nowadays. Some are even using data to identify key online advertising opportunities to drive people to their sites.
Ensure a better customer experience
The customer experience is everything online. Remember that it is far, far easier for customers to visit another website online than it is for them to visit another physical store.
This means companies need to ensure that the digital customer experience is flawless. For this reason, they’ll analyze everything they can about the customer experience.
This technology is impressive, as companies are even able to establish which parts of a website a person looks at, linked products and what they read. All this data gets collected and added together, and the decision-makers act upon it.
Increase sales
The main goal of all data collection is to increase sales. Every decision a business makes needs to be backed up by copious amounts of data. No big business will go by their ‘gut feeling’. They need to know that a potential sale-increasing idea is likely to pan out, so they don’t spend needless resources on it.
Move resources to the right areas
Finally, data analytics can allow companies to move cash to the right areas of their business. Without proper analytics, businesses often fail to allocate resources properly. This can lead them to spend more cash on losing propositions, and less cash on areas that are ripe for growth.
Businesses have limited resources, and they need to establish whether any cash invested will earn them more money in one market than another. For instance, in the digital space, this may apply to advertising.
Data-driven decision-making in practice
There are many examples of how data-driven decision making is impacting businesses. If you look at any change a business makes to the way they do things, they probably have extensive data backing up that change.
For instance, Amazon’s website goes through drastic changes regularly, all because data shows that these changes impact how much customers buy.
You can even see it at online casinos. The top ZA casinos with amazing offers will keep an eye on how their casino bonuses are performing and, if they perform well, will offer them more regularly.
If the offers aren’t performing well, they’ll use their collected data to analyze what the problem may be and come up with new offers.
Final thoughts
We have provided a quick overview of how data-driven insights are changing how businesses make decisions in the digital space.
This area of data analytics is already fairly well established, but new techniques will always be developed, and data will always be needed to shape the experience for customers to ensure the greatest number of sales and profit for the business.
The post How data-driven insights are reshaping decision making in the digital age appeared first on Political Analysis South Africa.
