What is it the greatest asset of an online company? What is at the core of your decision making and helps you make new strategies for your online business? What is the one resource that can help you with insights and innovations for your e-commerce business?
Well, it's ubiquitous yet hidden-in-plain-sight!
Yes you are right, we are talking about- Customer Data!
We are living in a data-driven world. By the very act of browsing an online shopping site, the customers provide a huge amount of data. Through their activities like the browsing pattern, product preferences, devices used, location etc they create digital footprints. When analysed and used this data can prove to be the most potent tool for advancing an online business.
Having a variety of data empowers a business owner. They can examine and analyse data, conduct experiments, derive valuable insights and arrive at decisions to improve their marketing, operations, products and overall business.
However, such data only gives you limited insight into your customers preferences. To understand your customers and markets better, you need to dig deeper and directly ask your customers what are they looking for exactly.
Wondering how to achieve this?
Well, the simple answer is to start using Online Forms.
Having user-friendly, simple and editable forms, customized for strategic purposes can give you a better insight into your business. Placing these forms at places where the customers are more likely to fill them can help you gather a huge amount of data for multiple purposes.
Right from capturing the personal details of your customers for account set up to capturing specific client requirements in an enterprise e-commerce environment, forms can be employed to harness data for a variety of purposes each adding to your valuable data resource.
An online business can use them for:
- Finding new customers and markets with referrals
- Getting repeat orders with order refill forms
- Better marketing with subscription-based mailing lists
- Measure product, team or brand performance with feedback
- Predicting demand with customized data fields in regular forms
Table of Contents
Top reasons to build online forms for your e-commerce business
With the right tools and inbuilt functionalities offered by the best e-commerce platforms like StoreHippo, online selling sites can create a variety of forms to get correct and specific insights from their own customers and use it to boost their conversions.
Some of the advantages of using forms across a website are:
1. Fast and Simple
With inbuilt forms, you can quickly collect all relevant data for your business. Pre-built forms can be used for creating simplified customer login, easy registration, subscription for newsletters, capturing shipping and billing addresses and a variety of other common uses. Collecting these data simplifies the end-to-end functioning of your business. With less manual intervention processes become smoother, faster and less error-prone.
2. Detailed Input
If a business requires specific and detailed inputs, custom online forms can be used to collect a variety of data like getting order queries from B2B and enterprise clients, setting up special survey based on client IP or device used, surveys to start a marketing campaign, adding custom fields to capture special customer requests like delivery time and many other use cases. This facilitates better request capturing and hence offering the best services and products to customers.
3. Transparent Data Handling
By enabling notifications (email, SMS, Push) on all forms the admin can be instantly alerted
4. Convenient and Faster Analysis
The manual effort in collecting data is substantially reduced when direct customer input is gathered via forms. Instead of calling or emailing customers and then collating the gathered information data is directly stored in the admin. This significantly reduces the time between data collection and analysis. Faster data analysis helps decision makers to access data and draw insights for various purposes instantly.
5. Better Response
Adding online forms gives the users a chance to add detailed responses about your products, services and their specific requirements. They also build trust for your brand as the customer perceives you as caring for their requirements. Since you are not forcing users to fill the responses the chances of their data being accurate is higher. Usually, people prefer this mode rather than a call from one of your agents who asks questions in an interview type manner.
6. Easy Follow Up
Once you get a detailed response from a client it is easier to follow up with them. Based on the user requirements, your support and sales teams can follow up with the clients with the exact solutions to their issues or requirements.
7. Improves Processes and Efficiencies
Data and responses collected using online forms bring to light hidden inefficiencies in your system or teams. You can improve your processes and facilitate you teams with better tools and resources to serve the customers betters. Also, with customer feedback, you can plug the loopholes that might be causing inefficiency in your system or organization.
Conclusion
We know that adding forms to a website has some undeniable advantages. With the right tools in your e-commerce platform, you can use this simple and effective method to mine relevant data and use it for giving your business an edge over the competition.
StoreHippo e-commerce platform offers a variety of inbuilt online forms which can be used by e-commerce website for completing some regular or special e-commerce functions. The platform also allows for creating custom forms which can be used for specific purposes and giving better insights into user requirements.
So, what are you waiting for, just add some forms to your e-commerce website and share the results with
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