How business intelligence builds personalised experiences

Attracting and converting more customers is essential for ecommerce brands, and business intelligence (BI) is one of the most effective ways of identifying their needs.

And with 71% of consumers saying they’re frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, increasing personalisation to resonate with your customers is one area for you to focus on.

But how can business intelligence help you understand the best way to build a personalised experience, for you and your customers?

Segment your customers

The first part of building a personalised experience with business intelligence is actually knowing who your customers are. What are their demographics, their interests, their purchasing habits?

With a business intelligence solution, data is taken from multiple sources allowing you to paint an illustrated picture of your customers. Perhaps you have Google Analytics (GA) connected to your BI platform, as well as social ad spend like Facebook. These systems combined can help you understand who your current ads are reaching, and who is visiting your website.

With this information you can create accurate customer personas, and compare those with your intended target audience.

That’s when you can move onto building your personalised experience.

Offer personalised recommendations

Now that you know who your customers are, you can start breaking that down into ways you can adjust your approach to be more personal.

One option is to offer personalised recommendations. Business intelligence can help with this in a number of ways.

Firstly, by looking at the purchase history of certain groups, you can see what they’re most likely to purchase - especially when redirected from Google or Facebook. You can then target recommendations to them through email, SMS, or on social media to capture more people within that customer group.

This can go a step further with business intelligence. Some solutions, like Patchworks BI, offer ABC analysis which shows you your best selling product groups. If a customer profile shows interest in one product, they might also be interested in a similar product within that group - and you can recommend that through your channels.

Be more dynamic with pricing and discounts

One way of increasing conversions is by having reasonable pricing which is also profitable. But what elevates a regular brand’s pricing strategy to an excellent one is data and insights, which is exactly what a business intelligence solution can provide.

In an ABC analysis, the ‘C’ group includes products which only provide 10% of your sales - understanding which products fall into this bracket can help you figure out why they’re selling poorly. Sometimes they’re just not a priority for your target audience, but it might be because they’re not good value for money compared to competitors.

It could actually be the case that products in the ‘C’ group are sought out by your target audience, but a chasm is created because of your pricing. Business intelligence can help you realise other situations like this, allowing you to make informed adjustments to your pricing which are personalised to appeal to your customers.

Business intelligence can also be used to personalise other areas related to pricing, such as discounts and sales. Is a certain product seeing huge demand amongst your target audience? Consider a price slash, then monitor your discount metrics to see how that’s performing. And by segmenting your audience with business intelligence, you can send targeted discount codes to groups of customers with specific interests and habits.

Monitor integrated personalisation tech

We’re in the most technologically advanced era of ecommerce, and that means there’s a solution for everything. So if your marketing team needs a bit of extra help targeting customers to increase conversions and retention, why not invest in a marketing solution which offers personalisation features?

However, when something like this is implemented, you want to know whether it’s good value for money and the ROI.

With a connected business intelligence tool, you can view how parts of your tech stack such as this are performing. For example, you can isolate specific periods of time for different stats. Have you seen more conversions since you implemented your personalisation solution? Or has your performance actually gotten worse, or stayed the same? If the latter, you may need to switch up your strategy.

Enter Patchworks BI

Looking for a reliable business intelligence platform which can scale with your business, and help you design a personalisation strategy to target your customers? Choose Patchworks BI.

Patchworks BI is a secure, fully hosted and managed Reporting as a Service (RaaS) solution, managed by a dedicated team of BI analysts and data engineers.

Built upon the Microsoft Power BI platform with data hosted in a cloud data warehouse, Patchworks BI leverages the Microsoft ecosystem to deliver Business Intelligence with greater performance than our competitors - ready to scale with your business.

Interested in finding out more? Take a look at our BI documentation for a full list of metrics and reports, or get in touch for a free consultation and demo.