How External Data is Leveraged for E-commerce Growth

The E-commerce market is going through an exciting and dynamic period. Having experienced steady growth over the last few years, E-commerce marketers enjoy a surging market with increasingly diverse and granular target audiences. The COVID-19 pandemic further boosted growth by forcing people of all ages from around the globe to go online for day-to-day purchases - including those who had never shopped online before.

This explosive upheaval is a tremendous opportunity for E-commerce marketers, who face a challenge in an industry where companies have relied on their internal data alone to understand their audiences and inform their marketing strategies.

These new demographics exhibit unfamiliar and distinct behaviors, and even previously existing demographics have changed due to the introduction of large numbers of new members. With competition on the rise, marketers need tools that will provide the insights necessary to analyze and engage their users in meaningful ways, without the privilege of decades worth of data.

External data presents a new path forward for companies looking to craft more efficient marketing strategies that will yield reduced costs per customer, increased conversion, improved customer retention, and more.

The power of external data

Harnessing internal data such as CRM records, transaction history, and ERP system details is a common practice among businesses. This approach can certainly enhance marketing strategies, driving sales, improving customer retention, and boosting conversion rates. But there's more to the data world than what's inside your organization - welcome to the realm of external data.

External data is an untapped treasure chest of information collected from the vast public web. Here, customers spend considerable time interacting on social media, posting reviews, searching on engines, and checking out competitor websites.

But external data isn't limited to online behavior. It includes metadata like location specifics, device information, and financial indicators, offering a nuanced understanding of your customers and predicting their future actions.

Moreover, the scope of external data goes beyond customer activities. It encompasses data from competitor websites, supply chain dynamics, weather updates, and more, providing a comprehensive outlook that could give businesses a competitive edge. By integrating external data, businesses can make well-informed decisions, strategize effectively, and stay ahead of the curve.

Leveraging external data for E-commerce

Due to the broad nature of external data, there are many ways that E-commerce companies can leverage it to better target customers or to give customers a better experience that will lead to more or repeat sales.

One of the most popular applications for external data in E-commerce is dynamic pricing. Marketers can apply a much richer data-driven strategy to alter product pricing for each customer in real-time.

By scraping E-commerce websites and monitoring the changes in pricing of rival products listed by competitors, gathering sentiment on social media, and technical data such as changes in supply or manufacturing shortages, a much more precise, competitive, targeted price can be presented to each customer, leading to increased ROI.

Another example of how external data can dramatically impact e-commerce marketing is through reviews analysis. By gathering consumer reviews from popular review websites, companies can gain key insights into who uses their products and what features or use cases customers have discovered organically that could be integrated into the main marketing effort.

For example, a company that sells pillows could find that many customers find a particular product to be great for use on a flight, and could incorporate those keywords into their campaigns. Furthermore, a company might find that their products are unexpectedly popular with a particular demographic, and begin targeting that demographic more heavily.

If you’re interested in learning more about these use cases, be sure to check out our article Exploring External Data Use-Cases for E-commerce where we delve deeper into how they function.

Challenges in external data gathering

While external data can be very valuable, there are several challenges that companies typically face when gathering it.

Unstructured Data

External data is gathered from a wide variety of sources, but often from public websites that have no API, such as competitors and search engines. Gathering the relevant data from multiple, differing sources requires developing individual processes for each source, and further maintenance for each of these processes.

Nimble’s Data Platform helps businesses gather unstructured data easily and effortlessly. By handling the gathering process from the ground up, Nimble APIs deliver web data from any website and provide you with a hassle-free experience.

Reliable Access

With the right data-gathering tools in place, consistent and reliable access to your sources is key. To maintain fresh, updated data, many requests need to be carried out continuously and rapidly. A high-performance, quality proxy network is critical to making sure these requests are carried out with a high success rate.

Nimble's proxy services provide a high-performance, massively scalable, and superior-quality proxy pool. Our algorithmically optimized IP infrastructure ensures your data-gathering operations will run smoothly while offering market-leading tools for control and flexibility.

Geographic Variance

Another challenge to effective external data gathering is accessing from different geographic locations. Many websites are only accessible from particular countries or offer different content depending on where they’re accessed from. Here again, the best solution is a deep proxy pool that offers IPs from any location around the globe.

Nimble's proxy services were designed to meet these needs and offer quality residential IP addresses from anywhere in the world. Nimble’s IP pool is constantly monitored and evaluated to make sure our clients only use prime IPs, offering best-in-class performance while still maintaining global availability.

Conclusion

For E-commerce companies, the time to integrate external data is now. The power of external data-driven marketing strategies makes all the difference in the extremely competitive e-commerce space. Companies that gather external data and act on their insights will be increasingly outperformed by competitors who do. While gathering external data can be challenging, Nimble’s Platform makes the process quick and effortless.

If you’re interested in learning more about Nimble's web scraping tool and starting a free trial, contact us and we’ll help you get started today.