Whether your business is online or offline, your business naturally generates data. What you do with that data can make you rich or put you in a cardboard box. If you’re offline, you have customers coming into your shop, restaurant, lemonade stand – whatever. If you’re online, you have similar information: website traffic, databases, customers, and a million other data points. Have you ever really thought about how much data you’re throwing away?

If you have an offline business, are you thinking about how many people are in your store every hour? How about their age? Gender? Area of the store they spend the most time? Probably not. Most people don’t, and it’s something anyone can do. On your website, are you looking at the path of every customer? Do you have a way to track every link clicked, when it was clicked, who clicked on it, and what they did? Do you solely rely on web services such as Google Analytics?

There’s a common phrase in various iterations floating around these days and it’s “The most important data is the data you don’t have”, and it makes a lot of sense. For every bit of information you don’t have, you’re tracking less than you should. Call it data warehousing, mining, business intelligence, “Big data” – call it whatever you want. What it boils down to is that every day it becomes less and less expensive to store and analyze information.

So what are you supposed to do? You should know that if you’re not collecting every bit of information you can, someone else definitely is. You need to be one of the smart ones, or you’ll be crushed. Here are some simple ideas that can reveal things about your business that you may not have ever realized, and they apply to both online and online businesses:

Customer Info

Get more than email addresses. Building a list is important, but it’s hard to really get to know someone just by their email address. Give something away to get a bit of information that people normally wouldn’t be willing to give up or that isn’t normally collected. Think about information that will allow you to make safe assumptions. Three easy ones are name, age, and phone number. The name will lead you to gender, which can be vital to targeting. Some people don’t want to give up their age. If you find that to be the case then offer something like a senior or student discount. This would give you three segmentations – students (18 – 24), seniors (65+) and other. A phone number can usually help figure out where people live. ZIP code works, but if you have their phone number then that’s two ways to figure out their location with one question. How about some unusual ones for brick and mortar? Ask people when they like to shop. It’s possible that opening at 9am is a waste of money, or staying open one more later might increase your revenue by 20%. How do people get to your place? Do they bike? Maybe a water cooler would attract some folks. Strike up conversation! Keep track of age groups, brands they wear, accessories they keep, bag or no bag. Maintain a good memory, and take mental notes. When the customer leaves, make notes about them. It won’t kill you to keep notes, even if it’s the old fashioned way, with a pen and pencil.

Patterns

Patterns occur everywhere. On your website, you might notice that people who visit the same pages in the same order are more likely to convert. Track every single visitor throughout their entire visit. Look for patterns, and note them. In your store, you might notice that there’s an empty spot all the time, people just seem to avoid that back left corner! Put some sale items back there, and near them have higher priced items and accessories. Big businesses have been doing it for years – offline merchandising is an art as much as it is a science. Aesthetics, layout, and content all play together and customer service seals the deal.

Trends

Don’t get stale. You need to pay attention. Anybody can open an online store, and everyone is. I’ve seen eBay stores be more successful than traditional ecommerce websites. You need to know what’s trendy and what’s not, because in today’s world it takes a fraction of a second to be yesterday’s thing.

ANALYZE.

Yeah. Do that. You need to be sharp, because competition is only going to get tougher. The next step in commerce is knowing your customers before they get to your store. Look at where they’re coming from, quickly look at where other people went on your site or in your store coming from that place, and offer them what those other people are looking at. Use your information to develop sort algorithms. Change page content for each visitor based on what you know about them. You can even do on-the-fly changes. Let’s say you have a newsletter signup on your homepage in a lightbox. As soon as they enter their email address, look up their info by email address over some APIs. Find out what you can, and personalize callouts. This is all relatively simple, and people just aren’t doing it.

If you’ve learned something – and I hope you have, awesome. If not, call us or drop us an email. We like data. We like data a lot. We’ll help you get the info you’re not collecting and put it to use.