Woolman and Ellis data team has been working with a wide variety of different eCommerce companies and brands during 2022. This year has seen a rise in data knowledge and maturity in the European direct-to-consumer (D2C) eCommerce market. We have started to see many brands truly starting to see the transition from "gut-feeling" -leadership to data-driven business leadership, where business decisions are based on sales, customers, and product data.
Despite the remarkable progress with the data in 2022, the gap between leaders and learners is widening. Many traditional brands are still searching for their own path to create monthly double-digit sales growth in business. You might be an established retail brand leveraging D2C, or B2B brand looking for new sales channels from the D2C market. The business logic and data knowledge needed in the D2C business is something you might be surprised by. You should be able to monitor your business data, make data-driven decisions like changing your marketing tactics and campaigns, and understand your customers to guide product development, not only on a monthly but weekly and daily basis.
Jumping into data-driven business development is proven to be scary and raises many fears. Your eCommerce merchant might have only limited experience with data, he/she might have difficulties seeing true relations of very basic metrics or might have very biased opinions e.g. many marketers tend to go into detail with marketing attribution models but forget to analyze product returns and neglect profitability. Your data team might be more interested in building reports, dashboards, and robust data pipelines with the latest technologies, forgetting actual business teams' needs, or your employees might just be afraid of their own position if they feel threatened as metrics bring transparency on actions done..
5 reasons to assist the transition to data-driven eCommerce with expert services:
1) Kickstart productivity
If your team is struggling with data and how to make actionable insights from it, you can benefit from having an external team working along with your own team. The team can practice and learn from external experts having experience working with several D2C brands. It is also an excellent way to kickstart productivity and increase data awareness. You will start to identify business improvement ideas from day 1.
2) Standardized reporting creating internal alignment
Internal alignment and visibility of data might be one of the most important things to fix. Minor detail like reporting sales in multiple currencies might lead to situations where the data is misinterpreted and actions aren't done. One remarkable benefit of using external help is harmonizing business monitoring and standardizing reporting dashboards your organization is following - this helps you to speak the same language with all stakeholders and build business visibility in your organization.
3) Understand the right metrics and KPIs to follow
D2C is famous for having so many important business metrics to follow, and on top of that, each expert is having their own opinions on the most important ones to follow. Despite the fact that traffic and conversions are examples of metrics each D2C merchant should follow, most businesses have their own very important business area-specific KPIs which should be followed regularly e.g., for packaged consumer goods selling larger product bundles to raise average order value might be critical for the business profitability. External help and standardized tools help you to get started with these.
4) Fresh ideas
D2C business is continuously growing and developing, at the same time methods and tools are evolving at a huge speed. Having an external team to help you analyze your business with the latest methods and bring new ideas into your teams. Your team might not be able, or they don't have time to analyze product data in detail to find out which products are the most likely bought together or who are the customers about to churn soon.
5) Have an expert second opinion
Sometimes you just need a second opinion and having an external team to audit your business and processes might be the best what you can do for your business. Simplifying eCommerce solution stack, clarifying roles and responsibilities, or reviewing data maturity by external experts can help you to develop your organization, and get you back to the growth track.
Woolman and Ellis data team have seen that transition to data-driven eCommerce can be assisted with external expert services and the right tools like Ellis. Our customers have seen double-digit monthly sales leaps by focusing right actions at right time. Woolman as Largest Shopify Plus Agency in Europe is happy to help you with all eCommerce data-related problems.
Written by Jani Kykyri