The Importance of Data Integration

Organizations around the world collect tons of digital data daily from a variety of sources for analytics purposes.  These data collected are stored in a wide range of data formats and seldom stored in a single format in a single database. But a good web analytics tool has the challenging task of consolidating all of these dissimilar data stored in different formats for critical business analysis.

If the analytics tool does a good job at the integration and analysis part, it should offer you an all-inclusive view of the organization’s processes and how good they are! Hence Data Integration plays a crucial role in web analytics.

Data integration is the critical activity of combining data stored in diverse formats spread out in various databases to be utilized by a single software tool. Simply put, data integration is the merging of unrelated constituents that don’t share any common characteristics.

Hence, this integration process has to be flawless for any web analytics solution to derive meaningful insights about the organization’s health or progress. The data integration process has to be precise for creating visualizations, dashboards, and generating reports with accurate and reliable information.

Inconsistent data integration can only produce meaningless data that are impossible to compare. Accuracy in data integration becomes all the more challenging these days due to the sheer size and diversity of data collected by digital analytics tools. Web analytics just cannot be efficient and reliable without a flawless data integration process in place.

Customized applications can be developed in-house for combining heterogeneous data from different storage sources into a single format. But when the size of the data grows exponentially, such applications may fail to consolidate the data efficiently.

To keep those homegrown applications running flawlessly with fast-growing, heterogeneous data, considerable investments have to be made on hardware and complicated coding has to be written. This may not be always feasible for all the organizations, especially start-ups.

Data Warehouse

So data warehouse is the only solution to this challenging data integration issue. A data warehouse acts as a database for dissimilar databases and helps you resolve this problem. It is predominantly a storehouse of unrelated information that other applications can access and readily utilize for analysis. This ready-to-use data is made available to the data warehouse through a process that extracts, cleans up, transforms, and provides data at scheduled intervals.

Various applications including the web analytics tool that need ready-to-use consolidated data will access a data warehouse and extract the required data for analysis. However, every data integration solution comes with its own shortfalls. And data warehouses are no different. But to implement an effective data integration solution for your organization, you must have sufficient resources and your requirements must be crystal clear.

Benefits of Integrating E-Commerce and CRM Systems

This section is for the e-commerce site owners who want to know how their customers interact on their site and how satisfied they are with it. Again, data integration is the only way to unravel such information. Data integration between your e-commerce site and CRM system will help identify your customer’s overall experience on your site! By integrating these two elements, you can improve the efficiency of your business and get rid of those duplicates from your web analytics data.

Here are some of the great web analytics benefits of integrating an e-commerce site and CRM system:

• If you can know how your website users are interacting with your e-commerce site, you can make their experience richer by changing or optimizing the content. This will increase the odds of making more sales through your site.
• Knowing the behavioral patterns of your website visitors is invaluable for your business growth. This knowledge will let you uncover your customers’ likes and dislikes, which will enable you to discover the most popular products/services among your customers.
• Constant data integration ensures that you are accessing the most up-to-date and precise user data irrespective of your existing analytics solution.
• Another critical benefit of an efficient data integration set up is improved employee efficiency. And it can bring down errors while keying in user data manually.
• It enables you to gather custom user data, which can help boost the efficiency of your existing business model. For instance, you can view these five revolutionary data about your customers in multiple ways right out of your CRM system.

Automatic Capture of Customers’ Contact Information

This is the most critical digital analytics benefit of integrating e-commerce and CRM. You can set up a data integration function to gather the contact information of your buyers directly from the e-commerce site and save it into the CRM system. This way you can bring down the errors that can arise when your purchasers enter this critical information manually.

Automatic entry of the purchasers’ contact information into the CRM system allows you to contact the customers and send targeted marketing messages to them in the future. Customers love to be thanked for their loyalty. Believe me, it’s a powerful marketing tactic too! You can utilize this auto-collected contact information to acknowledge your gratitude to them for being loyal to your business. You can also intimate special offers and discounts on your products to your devoted customers.

Traffic Pattern on your E-Commerce Site

By integrating your e-commerce site with a CRM system, you can collect a highly valuable web analytics data – the traffic pattern of users in your e-commerce site. You will get to know which product/service pages get the maximum number of visits and the period when the traffic is highest on certain pages. Are your buyers searching for some products in particular that you are unable to provide?

You can collect a whole lot of traffic pattern related information by integrating e-commerce and CRM systems together. This information is greatly valuable in making your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective. With this information at your disposal, you can surely improve your sales by aligning your advertising campaigns with seasonal demands. This user-data can help you acquire a clear edge over your rivals.

This user-related analytics data is also useful in helping you identify those stages of your sales funnel where the cart abandonment is the highest. This knowledge will enable you to bring down cart abandonment by optimizing your sales funnel and sales page. The result is a stronger sales funnel, effective customer retention mechanism, and happy customers due to a richer online experience on your e-commerce site.

Help keep a tab on products bought by customers

More than maintaining a precise inventory, there are other benefits of knowing what products were bought by your customers from your e-commerce site.  By keeping track of the purchased products, you can discover a whole array of information about the traffic patterns for each sold product. Like, the traffic sources, which traffic sources brought the maximum number of visitors, their demographics, region, and time and so on.

This will help you place the products at appropriate positions on your e-commerce site. Product purchase data also gives you insights about certain products that you can feature in the sales funnel as product suggestions. This information can also help you identify the problem areas in your sales funnel and rectify them effectively.

By correlating this information with e-commerce and CRM systems, you will get a holistic view of the likes and dislikes of your customers. The purchase information can also uncover those points in the sales funnel where customers are abandoning the cart, and whether they are abandoning it too early in the funnel or just before hitting the “Purchase” button.

You will frequently come across the term Sales Funnel in the marketing and e-commerce world.  But if you are new to this field and not sure what a sales funnel does, then here’s an informative video to get you started!

Help keep track of the revenue generated from purchases

The revenue generation details can be evaluated in a number of ways, such as by analyzing the following scenarios.

1. Do featuring specific products as suggestions in the sales funnel nudge the prospects to add more products to their cart?
2. Analyze what types of products are being purchased by your customers. This will allow you to make future marketing campaigns and inventory replenishments more efficient and targeted.

Featuring suggested products on your e-commerce site while customers add products to their cart is a great way to increase your revenue. And one of the best ways to know what products to display as suggestions is by scrutinizing the revenue generation information. By analyzing the purchase revenue for a certain time period you can forecast future buying patterns of your customers.

Improve overall buying experience by leveraging abandoned cart information

Abandoned cart information is a goldmine of vital customer details that you can utilize to optimize the overall buying experience of your users on your e-commerce site. This information will enable you to get back to those customers with a reminder of their abandoned items. This may not bring back all your lost customers, but at least get some percentage of those customers will return and complete the purchase on your site.

If the abandoned cart info is integrated with the past purchase details and its acquired revenue, it will allow you to display relevant product suggestions to your prospects. This integration of information will enable you to feature relevant additional accessories or trending products for prospects while they are completing the abandoned sale. The abandoned cart info will also open up some useful A/B testing opportunities on your e-commerce site.

If you see some compelling common traits in the abandoned cart info, you can perform some split testing (also called A/B testing) of your website elements and sales process.

Integrating Web Analytics Data with CRM

By integrating web analytics data with the CRM system you can create extremely effective marketing campaigns that can boost your conversion rate. Simply put, it becomes easier for you to convert a cold lead into a loyal repeat customer. Here’s one scenario that’ll make things clearer for you. Let’s pick the “Pages Viewed” metric for this scenario. This metric data is then passed from the web analytics tool to the CRM system.

Let’s imagine that a visitor browses through a few pages on your website and then fills out an opt-in form. This is the stage when you can integrate the web analytics data (the pages viewed) with the lead form data that he/she filled. The connection between the two data sets can be made using the user’s cookie ID and the unique ID generated for the opt-in record in the CRM system.

Technically, this connection between the two data sets (of web analytics & CRM) can be established by making use of the APIs of both the systems (i.e. of web analytics & CRM systems). Once both the data is tied together, you can leverage that combined data to know more about your prospects and design more efficient marketing campaigns based on them.

By integrating data from the e-commerce system into CRM (and back) you can boost sales and revenue in numerous different ways.

How can Rawsoft help you increase sales and revenue?

We at Rawsoft have helped clients from across different industries to attain their business goals by helping them increase their e-commerce conversion rate and revenue. We customize each consultation to match your business type, needs, and goals and help you optimize your e-commerce site for maximum revenue.

Our consultants will analyze your site’s analytics, usability, design, and help rectify those methodologies that are stopping your business from accomplishing higher conversions. Thanks to our seasoned business and technical know-how, we’ll make sure that your business continues to operate efficiently and generates revenue consistently for a long time.