Data plays a great role in every business, both big and small. Using data for small business can give owners access to a wealth of untapped insights that can eventually help boost sales. In today’s environment companies that can collect, analyze and make decisions based on data, win big!
Data strategies that help small independent business owners thrive:
Know your customers –
- The key here is to know your customers’ behavior. Without your customers, you wouldn’t be in business. Knowing who they are and what they want, particularly from you, can lead to more effective marketing, increased brand loyalty and eventually more sales –and that’s what you want.
- You can start collecting personal data like phone number, email addresses and demographics like age, occupation and gender from your customers every time they interact with your store or website. You can either do this on phone or chat up your customers in your store. Conduct online surveys or contests to gather more feedback. Give Google Analytics a try to get greater insights into your customer base.
- Look at their purchase history with you – what they purchase, when and how often. This helps understand what products and services to offer your customers in the future. Companies like Amazon and Flipkart use this powerful marketing practice, also known as “basket analysis.” This automatically delivers personalized product recommendations based on past purchases.
You can leverage the collected data to offer added value to your customers. Customer data will give you an insight into who to target and how to best communicate with, advertise and market to them.
Managing Customers’ Data and Effective Utilization:
Every time a user visits your website/store, you can promote new products based on above collected data or engage them in your product. But how do you track all this data?
For managing your internal business data and to help you make better business decisions, you can use various web analytics tools or CRM solutions easily available in the market. These tools help increase sales and improve user engagement, reduce churn rates and ultimately higher ROIs. You can choose from this list of software suitable to your business and its requirements.
Macroeconomic Factors:
There is lots of compelling data beyond just business data that SMBs can use to enhance their business.
For example, there are macroeconomic indicators which measure consumer spending and can highlight key consumer trends that can be useful.
Consumer spending is expected to be strong during holiday season. If your business is located next to a mall, you can add more staff or plan promotional events as more people would flock to the mall. Similarly, macroeconomic factors like the weather may impact your business. If you run a coffee shop and it’s too hot out there, you could add a few refreshing drinks to your menu.
These are just a few ways to use data in your small business. Data comes in handy especially when you have an online business.
Have you considered taking your business online? Instamojo helps you set up your online store in minutes! We even launched advanced data analytics to help get core insights into your business.
This post was penned by Pallavi Ahuja, Data Analyst at Instamojo.com
