4 Tools Your eCommerce Business Needs to Use in 2020

Running your own eCommerce business can be rewarding and very profitable, but it isn’t an easy feat to accomplish. There are a lot of things you need to keep track of and it’s easy to forget about an important aspect of your business if you’re doing everything without any assistance.

Luckily, technological advancement has provided us with many useful tools that eCommerce store owners can use to make their jobs easier and their businesses more profitable. There are a lot of tools available, some of which aren’t really useful, while some are necessary for every eCommerce business.

Here are all the tools your eCommerce business needs to use in 2020 to reach its full potential and increase eCommerce sales.

ETL tool

ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools are used by businesses to analyze and report on relevant data. These tools are also sometimes known as data transformation tools because one of the most important jobs of ETL tools is data transformation, which is the process of converting data from one format to another.

Since there are different kinds of changes data can go through during the transformation process before it’s delivered to its target destination, this process can be “simple” or “complex”. In today’s world where big data is a reality for most businesses, it’s impossible to do this job manually.

The data transformation process goes like this:

• Discovery. The first step of the process is discovering and identifying data in its original source format with the help of a data profiling tool.
• Mapping. The next step is planning and mapping out the transformation process.
• Generating the code. The data transformation tool creates a code that runs the transformation job.
• Executing the code. The code that was created in the previous process is put into motion to convert the data into the desired format.
• Review. The final step is checking the transformed data to see if it has been formatted to the correct format.

Data transformation is an important process because it allows companies to get the maximum value from their data and improve its usability. It also allows data to be managed more effectively and always be accessible, as it’s stored in a safe location where it can be easily retrieved.

Customer Loyalty Software

There’s nothing more important for any business than a loyal customer. Companies make more money from satisfied customers, as 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. Customer loyalty is an essential part of any successful business, and that’s why you need a customer loyalty program that will be beneficial for both you and your customers at the same time.

While you can set one up manually, the whole process will be much easier and better executed if you use customer loyalty software. This software is easy to manage and set up, and it will help you create powerful campaigns that allow you to reach every customer and provide them with special rewards.

Some things you can do with this software include:

• Setting up a points-and-rewards system. A reward system makes customers spend more just so they can earn points they can later trade-in for a reward. This type of system benefits you financially while also giving customers more value for the money they’re spending.
• Contacting customers. Contact your customers 24/7 via various communication channels. You can send emails in a couple of clicks, send push notifications to customer’s phones, and send messages based on specific parameters to individual customers.
• Increasing the number of repeat sales. Set up different incentives that are designed specially to increase the number of repeat sales and your average check size. This includes the above-mentioned point system, but also things such as holiday greetings and gifts.

Microsoft Excel

Even though some businesses don’t consider this tool to be very useful, it can actually be great for online marketing if you know how to use it and have Microsoft Excel support that can maximize your team’s efficiency.

Here are some of the useful things you can do with Microsoft Excel:

Keeping Track of Your Company’s Budget

There are a lot of things your company uses its budget for and if you don’t know exactly how much money you can spend on certain expenses, your company will be in serious financial trouble. Microsoft Excel is perfect for simple bookkeeping tasks, such as keeping track of the budget.

An Excel spreadsheet is easy to use and will save you a lot of time on manual calculations. It comes with many useful formulas and functions, as well as the ability to create graphs, all of which will tell you exactly how much money you have at your disposal.

Maintaining Social Contacts

Most eCommerce businesses have accounts on social media platforms where they build a following and communicate with their customers. If you want to open your own business accounts on social media, you first need to know what social media platforms are the best for eCommerce marketing.

After you’ve built a following, you can use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the results the content from your social media accounts is producing. You can analyze which platform works best for your business and focus more attention on it, and you can also track how many people converted through your social media accounts.

Generating and Tracking Leads

Not every person who comes to your website turns into a lead, so it’s important to measure your website’s traffic and track leads at the same time.

You can use an Excel spreadsheet to monitor how many people who visited your website actually expressed an interest and how many visitors bounced off your website before acting on your CTAs. If you keep track of these metrics, you can also plan out your marketing budget accordingly.

Monthly Market Metrics Reports

An Excel spreadsheet can give you a clear view of how much of your marketing efforts have paid off. You can keep track of all of your ad campaigns and see which of them brought a return on your investment, and which haven’t performed as you hoped.

If you run monthly market metrics reports, you can plan out future marketing strategies and improve on strategies that have failed in the past.

Marketing Automation Tools

If you don’t have a good marketing strategy, you won’t be able to sell your products no matter how good and high-quality they are. Another good thing that technological advancement has brought is marketing automation thanks to marketing automation tools.

A lot of companies are using these tools to improve their marketing strategies, and it’s expected that by the year 2023, the budget for marketing automation tools will reach $25.1 billion annually. There are a lot of different types of marketing automation tools and they all have different uses.

Here are some things you can do with them:

• Craft special messages to your customers based on their interaction with your business.
• Manage your sales pipeline, generate leads, and close deals with very little effort.
• Keep track of your marketing analytics so you can boost your revenue.
• Automate all of your ad campaigns and target them across different types of devices and platforms.
• Set up lead nurturing and lead management to be an automatic process.

Conclusion

There are many different techniques you can use to make your eCommerce business successful. Most of them require a lot of effort on your part, which sometimes doesn’t even pay off.

If you use tools, on the other hand, you can set them up and see how they show great results with very little effort. The tools you just read about are an absolute necessity for every eCommerce business that wants to be successful in 2020. 

We hope you enjoyed this promoted piece as much as we did!