– The author has a unique perspective on ecommerce due to their experience in the cloud connected smart home space, which provided them with valuable data on product usage.
– The author believes that many people in the ecommerce space lack the necessary context and data to accurately predict customer behavior and make informed decisions about retention and customer lifetime value (CLV).
– The author emphasizes the importance of collecting and utilizing data to improve acquisition, messaging, and customer experience in order to increase repeat customers and solve issues with customer acquisition cost (CAC).Collect and analyze customer data to improve acquisition, messaging, and customer experience in order to increase repeat purchases and solve issues related to customer acquisition cost (CAC).I have lots of takes that go against the grain when it comes to e-commerce. I came from the cloud-connected smart home space, which means I had data on their product’s usage with their end customers. If you’re not from the cloud-connected device space or app space, you’ve never had this data. I forget that my experience is different from a lot of people’s experience in the e-commerce space. Things that seem simple to me around what you can and can’t predict about customer behavior aren’t to a lot of people. So my controversial takes around retention, CLV, and other things are coming from a place of having had more access to data in my career than someone selling non-internet connected things. The fact is, that’s most people that run agencies and store apps. Those are the people that are telling you about frameworks to use that worked for some of their clients. They follow these things because they are better than doing nothing. It’s not to say that what people are suggesting is completely wrong, it just lacks the context necessary to actually test these things and be able to measure with data their real impact related to product usage and growth of product usage. So taking a pause for a second, learn from my experience here. I stopped caring about a lot of KPIs when I moved back to non-connected products because I no longer had data that I could reasonably predict product usage on. This was a problem, so we needed to invent a solution. We worked to build a platform (Formtoro) designed to give you the most amount of information possible around intent and customer-provided usage data prior to making a purchase so that we could improve acquisition and segment the audience later. Better messaging using this data means: We could get more product in hands, which provides a better chance for people to use a product. The more chance for people to find value in a product, the higher chance of someone buying it again. Repeat customers are determined by the person’s experience with the product and unlike connected smart home products that feed back usage data to the cloud simultaneously, most of the products people are selling don’t. YOU CANNOT PURCHASE A SECOND TIME WITHOUT PURCHASING A FIRST. Sorry for the all caps on this one, but of all the companies I’ve interacted with, the one universal thing is they all want more customers. Right now, they are all complaining about CAC without any real ideas of how to solve or improve it outside of “better creative”. You can’t make better creatives without better data collection and better understanding of the context around that data relevant to revenue and conversion rate. You need the data first. Data provided by your visitors should be telling you how to improve your ads, landing pages, and product pages. Yet most aren’t collecting the right data or know how to ask the right questions. We can do better. #ecommerce #retention #datahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco