Marketing data management is a robust set of processes that allows marketers to gain insight into user behavior and consumer profiles, enabling them to make more informed decisions. It can help marketers better understand their target market and develop strategies tailored to their customers’ needs.
As ecommerce businesses continue to grow, the need for marketing data management increases. But it also becomes more complicated. If you’re building a data-driven business today, you will frequently need a data management platform and expertise to really build out your marketing campaigns.
This article will explore the basics of data management and how it can help ecommerce marketers better understand their customers.
What is marketing data management?
Marketing data management systematically collects, categorizes, and analyzes customer data. This data can include customer demographics (age, gender, income level), product preferences, purchasing behaviors, online activity such as website visits and searches, interactions with email campaigns or advertisements, and much more.
The goal of marketing data management is to provide marketers with the actionable insights they need to shape their strategies. By understanding customer behavior, marketing data management allows businesses to target customers more effectively and tailor their offerings to meet the needs of specific audiences.
Types of data used in ecommerce marketing
Regarding ecommerce marketing, there are many forms of marketing metric. These include:
customer information such as age, gender, location, and income level;
purchase history including product preferences, customer lifetime value (CLV), and average spend;
website activity such as page views and time on site;
email engagement metrics such as open and click rates;
online ad performance including impressions, clicks, and conversions;
social media engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares);
and more.
Some marketing strategies rely on multiple data sources (such as numerous marketing channels), which requires data integration. Other marketing strategies need real-time data to adapt the customer experience and customer journey to the customer’s behavior. But whenever data is used for marketing, it falls under marketing data management.
Strategies for effective data management
Many companies maintain a vast data warehouse yet never use their data to inform decision-making or ramp up their digital marketing. It’s easy to collect data that never becomes useful, especially if you don’t have a robust enough customer data platform, contain the wrong data sets, or doubt your data quality.
Consider the following strategies to make the most of your data management efforts.
Set clear goals: Establishing clear goals from the start will ensure that you collect and analyze the correct data and maintain valuable data sets.
Collect data accurately: The data you collect must be accurate and up-to-date. Regularly update your data to have the most current information possible. Otherwise, your marketing analytics could easily mislead you.
Create segmentation strategies: Segmenting your customers by demographic or product preference can help inform more targeted campaigns and increase customer engagement.
Analyze data regularly: Set aside time regularly to analyze your data. This will help you identify trends, understand customer behavior, and make more informed decisions.
Experiment with new strategies: Tap your marketing teams for creativity and innovation based on your data-driven marketing metrics. Use marketing data management by experimenting with new strategies to find what works best for your business.
Utilize automation tools: Automation tools can save time and energy when collecting, categorizing, and analyzing data, especially when the volume of data grows. Automated martech will aggregate data into your data management system and perform essential data governance.
By understanding the basics of marketing data management and following these steps, you can start collecting and utilizing customer data more effectively to make informed decisions that will improve your ecommerce business.
Challenges of marketing data management in ecommerce
While marketing data management can be highly beneficial for ecommerce businesses, it also comes with some challenges. These include:
Data collection: Collecting accurate and up-to-date information is essential, but it can be time-consuming. Customers may only sometimes provide all the necessary information, or they may provide inaccurate information.
Data analysis: Analyzing data can be overwhelming due to the sheer amount of information available, and it can be difficult to identify meaningful patterns from all the noise.
Privacy regulations: When collecting customer data, businesses must abide by privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Data storage: Storing customer data securely and efficiently can be challenging, as there is always the risk of losing or compromising information.
Security issues: With so much data being stored, businesses must ensure their systems are secure from cyber threats.
Despite these challenges, ecommerce businesses can still benefit from marketing data management. With the right strategies and tools, such as automation and segmentation, companies can make better decisions based on accurate customer information.
Data management tools for ecommerce marketers
Today, data management tools aren’t optional. From customer profiles to audience segments, there are vast volumes of data to mine. Use marketing technology to improve data privacy and security and create a single source of truth for your marketing strategies.
The types of data management tools available to ecommerce marketers include:
Analytics tools: Analytics tools allow businesses to track website performance and user engagement and view in-depth customer insights.
Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions: These systems help businesses manage customer data and build customer relationships.
Automation tools: Automation tools can be used to optimize processes such as collecting, organizing, and analyzing data.
Reporting tools: Reporting tools provide businesses with detailed visualizations of customer data, allowing them to take action quickly and effectively.
Data storage solutions: Data storage solutions keep customer information secure and make it easy to access the data when needed.
Data management tools can be an excellent asset for ecommerce marketers, allowing them to make informed decisions and better understand their customers and build customer engagement. With the right tools and strategies, ecommerce businesses can use data management to improve customer experience and drive revenue growth.
Start managing your analytics with Emotive Attribution
By understanding the basics of marketing data management, ecommerce marketers are taking the first step toward better understanding their customers through their customer data. They can build better marketing strategies with the right data management tools and attune their marketing strategies to their customer behavior.
Emotive Attribution can help. Emotive Attribution helps marketers manage their analytics across multiple channels, improving the effectiveness of their marketing and reducing their marketing and advertising spend. Check out a demo of Emotive today.