Data-driven strategies for higher business

E-commerce continues to grow every year, with more consumers using their computers and mobile devices to make purchases electronically. With fewer chances to meet customers face-to-face, companies must rely on digital footprints and strong analytics to develop a greater understanding of their growing and dispersed customer base.

AutoAnything is a leading online retailer of specialised automotive products that improve the protection, comfort, safety, style and performance for all vehicles. The company’s core belief is to always do what is in the best interest of the customer, but providing top service requires understanding who the customer is and how best to serve them.

For years, AutoAnything had been working with Adobe Analytics, an Adobe Analytics Cloud solution in Adobe Experience Cloud, but Brandon Proctor, President of AutoAnything, knew that the company wasn’t using Adobe Analytics to its full potential. Under his direction, the company began training marketing and merchandising teams to understand and analyse the data.

“I’m a strong believer in analytics,” says Proctor. “If you’re not on the path to becoming more data-driven, you can really miss out on opportunities and lose business.”

But for Proctor, embracing analytics is about more than having a dedicated analytics team on staff. Rather, he believes that in order for an organisation to be successful, everyone should be an analyst and use data to inform decisions, regardless of their role. Whether they’re a merchandiser trying to understand how to group recommended products or a social media marketer looking to engage with high-value customers, analytics must be at the core.

“As a company that heavily relies on data to drive our business, we have benefitted from invaluable insights delivered by Adobe Analytics for nearly a decade,” says Proctor. “Adobe Analytics enables advanced and relevant customer insights in a digestible and actionable way; our success is dependant on the analysis we glean from Adobe.”

Identifying high-value customers

AutoAnything brings all IP, settings and other environmental data from online visitors together to create a customised digital fingerprint that identifies users before they even make a purchase. Based on this information, marketers can determine the total customer lifetime value. By understanding the browsing traits and engagement channels common to high-value customers, marketers can adjust strategies and allocate spend to reach those customers with the highest lifetime value.

“We may assign seemingly disproportionate value to a channel knowing that the results will be fantastic in the long term, even if they initially seem poor,” says Proctor. “The insight that we’re getting from Adobe Analytics allows us to go to market in a unique way and reach these customers before our competitors.”

Further, Adobe Analytics allows AutoAnything to pull data from all channels to reduce “black holes” in the customer journey. Previously, if a customer browsed online but decided to complete an order with a telephone call, AutoAnything lost sight of the customer’s journey.

The company now includes an identifier in the confirmation email that relays customer information back to Adobe Analytics and ties together the off-line and online data. This enables AutoAnything to appropriately identify and allocate budget to channels and campaigns that drive off-line orders.

While Adobe Analytics is used to tune proactive marketing outreach, it also helps focus efforts on higher-value audiences and away from challenging customers. For example, AutoAnything can shy away from engaging customers who demonstrate uncharacteristically high lifetime costs, such as dozens of touchpoints and campaigns before each purchase.

Also, if the data shows that a single user ID is attempting multiple different log-ins, this may indicate potential fraud. By leveraging Adobe Analytics, Proctor and team can minimise marketing waste by prioritising targeted customers with whom they want to engage for the long haul.

Embracing analytics across teams

Investment in data as a strategic factor for AutoAnything didn’t come overnight. While teams were initially cautious about diving into analytics, many marketers and merchandisers have achieved phenomenal results from adopting the data-driven approach. Ad hoc analysis gives teams nearly unlimited control over data, allowing people to focus on any element and dive deep into the numbers.

Merchandisers are tracking customer records to identify relationships between products and categories. Meanwhile, marketers pull together attributions from across channels to eliminate silos and gain a truer view of how channels contribute to revenue. Since the people analysing the data are the ones closest to the product or campaign, AutoAnything can switch directions quickly when needed.

“In one case, a team noticed low traffic for one product page,” says Proctor. “By diving into the data with Adobe Analytics, they realised that there was an issue with the way that Google was indexing the web pages. A simple redirect fixed the problem, literally doubling product sales overnight.”

One marketer working with paid social was finding it difficult to understand the effects on the bottom line. Social media platforms often delivered only basic analytics and often widely overstated results. Proctor advised working through models and focusing on the results that the team was seeing in Adobe Analytics. When the team was done, they grew paid mobile revenue over 400%, while also scaling at a much more profitable rate.

“I have found that encouraging buy-in for analytics isn’t very difficult, as there will always be people who want to push themselves to learn more,” says Proctor. “These people become leaders and by sharing their positive results with peers, other teams will naturally want to learn. By making sure that the right data is being collected and giving people access to a fantastic tool such as Adobe Analytics, we can help everyone embrace data to bring more value to customers and the company’s bottom line.”

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