Product companies are improving their customer reach by adding channels. For a leading US-based manufacturer of heating, ventilation, cooling and commercial refrigeration products, that meant using their own web store to reach B2C and B2B customers (like Home Depot). The web store, built on an Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) platform, was able to deliver a sophisticated and convenient Amazon-like experience for customers. As the manufacturer was expanding their business, they knew that passive approaches to sales, waiting for customers to arrive at their web store, would not work. They needed to proactively reach out to potential customers. This is when the manufacturer realized that they needed to identify who their online customers were, where they came from, what they were looking for, their buying journey, why they were abandoning their carts and what could be done to convert them into buyers and improve wallet share. One simple statistic tells us why it is important for businesses to track and understand these metrics: Cart abandon rates are 42% and organizations can make $76,000 per $1 million turnover just through targeted emails to customers who had abandoned their cartsⁱ.

This meant ferreting key information related to customers visiting the web store. To implement this, Wipro used Google Analytics as a solution. By embedding Google Analytics into every webpage of the store, it became possible to track a number of business metrics. The sales team could track visitors by day, date, time of visit, region, IP, the search terms they used, the webpages/ products they had browsed, the products they had selected and placed in the cart, their billing, their names and demographics (if they had logged into the site with their credentials), method of payment, their shipping address etc.

Once Google Analytics was in place, the manufacturer had access to data that could be used for smart marketing. Not only could they create deals for customers who had abandoned their carts and improve sales but also tell which products appealed to different customer segments thus making it possible to do better product bundling, identify the types of discounts that could improve sales, identify which customers could be offered free shipping based on minimum purchase, and make sales forecasts based on the behavior of customers.

While Oracle EBS offers an ERP platform for a world-class online shopping experience with up-to-date product catalogs, descriptions and quick searches, Google Analytics can be leveraged to intelligently provide customers with better offers, improve conversions and boost sales. The tool provides companies a way to visualize what is happening in their web store so that actionable insights can be extracted and the customers can be nudged toward completing their transactions. For said manufacturer, the new analytical tool helped in improving conversionrates, average order value, providing data on time of day when customers made purchases (enabling better preparedness in their supply chain and delivery processes).

Likewise, other smart organizations can leverage Google Analytics on their ERP platform based web stores to analyze website traffic (organic, email, referral, social, etc.), track the efficacy of their online marketing campaigns, track online sales and revenue, identify customer demographics and shopping behavior to improve the overall performance of their web stores.

References:

ⁱ https://www.freshrelevance.com/resources/real-time-marketing-report-for-q3-2018