What E-commerce have been missing all along
The Change in Habit and Reality of E-commerce
Every e-commerce brand attracts massive regular website traffic, and every single of those website visitors is a potential customer. However, the percentage of visitors that end up buying something is very low, to the point where it's almost unbelievable. On average, only 1% o those visitors actually buy something.
A global pandemic has forced us to stay more inside the home than we were ever used to. With that, companies did not just sit around; instead, they were very innovative in making people get used to online life. With that, online shopping has improved significantly with the rise in e-commerce of all sorts. Food home delivery has also has become the new norm now. Even Instagram & Facebook have a build-in store/marketplace now.
In a nutshell, people have gotten used to online purchasing. As a result, it's a no-brainer that the website visitors have spiked more than ever. What if you could turn these visitors into customers, at least more than the average, which is just 1%. Well, let's go over the possible way to do that.
Data Science to the Rescue
All these visitors have one thing in common: they all have some website visit behavior. A vague imaginary example, some people might visit specific pages, stay a certain amount of time on certain pages, and click certain areas on the page like product comments, descriptions, etc. These are all behaviors. Well, some of these visitors have made a purchase, and some did not. What if the behavior of these two can be distinguished?
That is precisely where data-science comes to the rescue. Let me introduce a data-science model: Propensity to Buy Model. By definition, it is the likelihood of a potential customer to purchase something, a.k.a Purchase Propensity. This model learns the behaviors as mentioned earlier and many more from past visitors' data. As a result, the model learns to differentiate the behaviors that lead to a purchase from those that do not lead to a purchase.
After the model learns the behaviors, the model then predicts which of the new visitors will purchase something and which will not. This lets you know which visitors have a higher probability of purchasing something. All you need to do is engage them with some coupons, discounts, etc., to secure the sale.
How to the propensity to buy for the visitors?
There are of course many ways to create such a model. This article, however, aims to bring out the easiest way. The most important resource for this to work is the website visit data.
The platform we are going to utilize is called Enhencer | Predictive Storyteller for Customer Journey. Visit the official website to learn more and sign up for free: https://enhencer.com/.
Enhencer has a custom-designed API that can be integrated into the website. The best part of this is; Enhencer collects all the visitors, sales, and product data automatically and continues to collect in real-time. All you have to do is integrate the API into the website. Here is how to integrate:
Enhencer has a custom-designed API that can be integrated into the website. The best part of this is; Enhencer collects all the visitors, sales, and product data automatically and continues to collect in real-time. All you have to do is integrate the API into the website. Here is how to integrate: https://enhencer.com/help
All these might sound crazy, but I haven’t gone to the crazy part yet. Once the API is integrated and the data collection is done, Enhencer does something even crazier:
- Enhencer takes all these data and processes them, does Feature Engineering automatically for you. Say goodbye to long SQL sessions for such tedious tasks.
- Afterward, Enhencer trains many machine learning models; like decision trees, random forests, neural networks, etc, on the data and chooses the best performing one automatically.
It provides the user with a dashboard with predictive analytics. The dashboard is as bellow:
Enhencer also segments these visitors on their likelihood of purchase. Therefore, you will know the behaviors of the visitors in each segment. If you ask what use this may be in real life; in reality, this shows what kind of behavior leads to a purchase and thus this segment of visitors can be targeted to maximize the purchase propensity. What more, you can send the list of visitors from the segments directly to Facebook ads and Google ads, without the hassle of exporting.
Enhencer provides the predictions for the visitors of the website in terms of the likelihood of purchase something. At the same time, Enhencer continues to predict the new website visitors' likelihood to purchase something in real-time. Therefore, e-commerce can target these visitors and secure a potential sale.
When your visitor segments are ready in hand, all you have to do is to engage them with proper marketing campaigns and all. This can increase the overall conversion rate from 1% to more than 10%. This means the online sales will increase significantly. This means every day millions of potential customers are knocking on your door and you can open the door for them and engage them and as a result experience increase in sales figures.
