Big Data – you’ve probably heard of the buzz-word a thousand times, and might even have read dozens of articles on how it’s the next big thing. This time, believe the hype; big data is already ‘really big’, and it’s helping retailers, both small and large, scale up to the next levels of success in terms of more sales, greater margins, lower operational costs, better inventory planning, and optimized pricing. Big Data, simply put, is an IT enabled infrastructure that captures data from the maximum possible sources of data in your business; right from vendor purchase orders to customer feedback forms, and analyzes the same to create intelligible, actionable, and empowering knowledge for business decision makers. Here’s how big data can make a difference and help you grow big on sales in 2016.

Marrying Big Data and CRM

The days of paper punch cards to track customer purchases are long gone; CRM tools and plastic loyalty cards equipped with micro-chips help retailers (both offline and online) not only promote repeat purchases, but also allow them to make more sense of existing data on previous customer purchases, replenishment times, etc. By blending big data system with CRM strategies, you can leverage crystal clear actionable information on

-the products with maximum probability of being re-ordered by customers,

-time at which the customer’s existing stock will run out (so that you can trigger replenishment sales emails), and

-the right pricing; so that you don’t lose out on vital sales dollars because of underpricing your products so much that the composite of production, procurement, packaging, marketing, and logistics costs are not recovered!

Big Data – Totally Relevant for e-Retailers

Big Data has often been confused as an expensive IT investment only relevant for big retail stores. However, big data technologies are already helping e-retailers and websites achieve greater levels of sales, revenues, traffic, subscriptions, and shares, already. Big data enables webmasters and web-store managers to understand the strategies that drive maximum traffic to their websites, the most common navigation pattern of consumers, the most successful call to actions, frequent causes of cart abandonment, most quickly moving products, most sought after deals and discounts, and most searched for items and content pages. By recognizing the most important channels of traffic for your websites, you can re-define and optimize your web marketing strategies to drive more store visits, resulting in more sales.

Empowering email marketing campaigns for more sales

Email Marketing is the life and soul of digitally empowered businesses. Even pure offline retail Businesses have a lot to gain from localized email marketing. With a big data system to garner and analyze the massive data generated in your business every day, you can optimize your email marketing campaigns to drive sales higher than ever. Trust big data to procure important information such as –

• The subject lines that draw the maximum number of people to open the message
• The days of the week, and the times in the day, when the emails prove to be most successful
• The best content strategies that draw visitors to click on the store visit buttons from your emails
• The best times to send product replenishment emails to maximize probability of re-order
• Designing product bundles that are likely to appeal most to consumers
• Dividing subscribers into targeted groups, and mapping email marketing strategies to these groups, for maximizing ROI
• Enabling cross –selling and up-selling opportunities by identifying the perfect products that are most likely to appeal to consumers

Give Your Business the Best Chance of Ramping up Social Marketing Driven Sales

Big Data is a massive shot in the arm for your business’ social media marketing team. No need to waste your managerial man hours and costly executive man hours on deciding social media marketing strategies based on impressions and intuitions; big data will tell you what to say, when to say, and whom to tell, in the clearest possible manner! Imagine being able to prepare a personalized product bundle, priced within the customer’s psychological pricing bracket, and a crisply worded post triggered to the Facebook wall of the customer just when he/she’s contemplating going for a purchase! Sounds like magic – doesn’t it? Well, it’s just big data.