Retailers have always tailored their businesses to the needs and desires of their customers, so it’s no surprise that better shopper data and analytics are allowing them to accomplish this goal with greater success. With many merchants now looking to transform their businesses into one that reaches and engages across multiple channels, the use of data and analytics will become even more important.

At the recent Demandware XChange conference, guest speakers talked in depth about analytics and their evolved usage at retail organizations. New data initiatives revolve around understanding the customer, and while product information is still paramount to success, it is playing an equal part in the formula for creating a compelling retail brand.

“With this customer-centric model, any measurement is also naturally omnichannel as well,” explains Vinod Kumar, eCommerce strategist at Demandware. “For example, according to IDC Retail Insights’ consumer survey, an estimated 48 million ‘showrooming’ shoppers spent $68 billion during the 2012 holiday season.”

“Smart retailers are starting to acknowledge this as an irreversible trend and are making plans to embrace as part of their overall consumer engagement strategy instead of creating resistance within their organizations,” he added.

To maximize their data campaigns, Kumar notes the importance of collecting and consolidating information from a variety of operations. Of course, this starts with customer data (transaction history, demographic information, etc.) but also extends to store operations (such as order processing and shipping metrics) and web analytics (traffic breakdowns and website clicks).

If retailers want to improve their eCommerce operations and create an omnichannel retail empire, they need to look at data across the board.

Making information useful
The retail experts at the conference spoke extensively about the importance of collecting data, but it’s just as critical to be able to segment, sort and organize information in a way that makes sense. It’s quite possible to have too much information and be unable to do anything with it because merchants can’t separate important data from noise.

ECommerce software solutions such as SalesWarp can be used to consolidate and analyze present data from both online and brick and mortar operations with customizable reports that allows users to organize data as they see fit and access the information that is most relevant to the task on hand.