Key factors in e-commerce: Insights into the fifth chapter!
Finally, the time has come! The 2nd edition of the successful “Key Factors in E-Commerce” is now available. Get a small foretaste here already and gain first insights. If you don’t know the first chapters yet, click here for the first, here for the second, here for the third and here for the fourth.
Prof. Dr. Richard C. Geibel and Robin Kracht from the E-Commerce Institute have jointly revised and updated the work. Secure your copy now here as an eBook or softcover!
5. Data driven Marketing
The consistent use of digital technology offers the potential to analyze usage and process data. With the help of such analyses, the quality of operational and strategic decisions in e-commerce can be significantly increased.
This results in an advantage for all e-commerce companies that systematically analyze the use of their digital platform (see Kollmann 2019, p. 414 ff.). Marketing for the online store experiences a significant increase in knowledge. Data-driven marketing increases the accuracy of advertising campaigns and helps to adapt the online store to the preferences of users.
5.1 Data and the digitization of advertising
For decades, the advantage of marketing and advertising in the classic mass media was that a large number of recipients could be reached simultaneously. However, the direct effect of advertising on the individual recipient remained unclear, because this could and still can only be measured indirectly. There is a lack of a back channel where information is provided about the type and extent of the reception of the advertising.
But the lack of a feedback channel for advertising activities is a thing of the past with the digitization of marketing and advertising. Responsible for this are the technological changes in online marketing, which increasingly organizes the communication of companies digitally. The more a campaign is carried out or supported online, the greater the volume of storable and, above all, interpretable data on the recipients’ reception and response. To a certain extent, the data accrues as a by-product that can achieve significant competitive advantages in analysis (Donnelly 2018, p. 5 ff.). This is particularly true for e-commerce companies, where the majority of business processes are handled digitally.
Example: Email Newsletter
While the sending of a letter in the context of a direct mail piece does not allow any conclusions about the actual reception of the contents of the letter, in the context of a software-supported sending of email newsletters it can be identified whether an email has been opened and how intensively the users have used the contents of the email as well as linked contents.
5.2 Benefits of Data Driven Marketing
If the available data is used to make the reception of advertising more targeted and to optimize the effect, this is referred to as data-driven marketing. Data Driven Marketing means objectifying and streamlining the marketing process with the help of data, which places the goal-means relationship of each campaign and individual measure in the focus of marketing.
Data Driven Marketing is used to measure in detail the reaction of users and customers to the design of advertising and the online store. The main areas of usage that can be captured in this process are:
- Access to the online store via different channels
- Temporal aspects of the use of the store
- Content-related usage of the store offers
- Technical aspects of use
- Type and scope of commercial transactions carried out in the online store
With data on these and many other user activities, e-commerce companies are able to analyze and control the acceptance and use of the platform, individual contents and products. Above all, the targeting accuracy of individual measures can be determined in order to reduce wastage (Kotler et al. 2017, p. 147 ff.).
