Smart Data is a new term referring to digital information derived from Big Data and converted into actionable data a business can use to improve marketing decisions, website design, information for customers, etc. Unlike Big Data, which collects everything, Smart Data is contextual and rich in meaningful information: key performance indicators (KPIs), conversions, retention, and other actionable insights are smart data.
Smart Data is extracted from Big Data by intelligent algorithms and turned into patterns or other information that shows user behaviors, buying intelligence, trends, sales analytics, and more.
Key Benefits of Smart Data Analytics
Turn Unstructured Data Into Actionable Insights
Big Data is immense, unstructured, and essentially useless if you don’t “filter” it through several algorithms to get the best meaning and information out of it. To get to the smart data, you must reduce the level of information delivered by Big Data into actionable insights. To do so, you create subsets or clusters of data based on specific delimiters like customer purchase history, location, behavior on your site, and other factors relevant to your business.
Better Customer Targeting
By understanding customer behaviors and buying preferences, marketers can improve sites - imagery, product information, pricing, and special offers - for better sales and increased ROI.
Analyzing the data from past promotional campaigns may help marketers design better promotions that target particular customer segments, interests, related purchases (for example, Amazon’s “Products related to this item”), and other predetermined criteria based on smart data.
Identifying customer browsing patterns, coupled with product categories, can target the right customer segments and boost sales when the promotions are coupled with other marketing campaigns like advertising and personalized emails.
Predicting Customer Demand
Smart data analytics is helpful in sales forecasts, valuable especially for eCommerce sites to optimize their inventory and stock. This also works to predict potential sales and refine marketing strategies to meet those goals.
Using smart data analytics to predict customer demand will avoid alienating website visitors with offputting out-of-stock items and slow delivery times. Retailers can use analytics to predict returns and sourcing too.
Better Business Intelligence
Understanding what consumers need, like to buy, and want to pay delivers the necessary smart data to help businesses improve sales and grow. For example, in 2018, AB InBev acquired Weissbeerger to tap into data to analyze beer drinkers and their habits, what flavor of beer they like, as well as how much beer is sold, where and when, to improve its market outreach.
“Thanks to Weissbeerger, we can better support our hospitality industry partners, and we can tap into the evolving consumer needs even better,” AB InBev spokesperson Peter Dercon told De Tijd.
Smart data also allows businesses to spot trends and innovate faster, according to Dercon.
How to Optimize Websites Based on Smart Data Analytics to Improve Sales?
To optimize websites for more sales based on smart data analytics, you must put the information you gather at the best use:
- Understand your website visitors, their browsing patterns, and expectations, and deliver the user experience that makes the customer journey on your site enjoyable. A good user experience is essential because happy customers return and advocate your products on other sites, via email, social media, or word of mouth.
- Use smart data analytics to refine website content enough to persuade visitors to make a purchase.
- Gather intelligence to predict demand and create special promotions and marketing strategies based on the data.
- Use data to create content for particular segments of customers - for example, to satisfy your existing clients or to attract new ones.
- Optimize product pages for maximum conversions analyzing data from across multiple channels.
- Offer personalized user experiences on your site based on their interests - for example, Amazon’s “Customers who viewed this item also viewed.”
- Optimize your product portfolio: see what sells and doesn’t and either enhance promotion for the products that convert or improve the pages for products that don’t. You could also decide to eliminate poorly performing website pages. In this case, remember to update your internal linking structure to avoid creating broken links that damage your SEO.
Wrapping Up
Because smart data analytics requires input for several channels, you may consider going beyond Google Analytics (which already provides enough for small businesses) and employing software like InetSoft or Supermetrics.
It’s in your best interest to optimize a site based on smart data analytics, not only for better sales, but also to make your site more relevant and discoverable in search, deliver a better customer experience, and improve customer conversions and retention, and advocacy.
