The Importance of Data Visualization in eCommerce Marketing Strategies

Visuals are important in marketing, period. Whether it’s print or digital, images, graphics, charts and diagrams help make understanding and processing information easier for viewers. In fact, humans, as a species, are visual learners and process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Additionally, a team of neuroscientists at MIT discovered the human brain can process images that the eyes see in under 13 milliseconds.

Mary Potter, an MIT professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and senior author of the study, notes that, “[t]he fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts. That’s what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we’re looking at,” which means that processing imagery isn’t just about looking at information, but rather making sense of it as well.

Moving forward, we’re goin to cover three tips that will help you understand why data visualization is important for every brand’s eCommerce web development, and how you can implement these tactics into your eCommerce digital marketing strategy.

See It with Your Own Eyes

When it comes to eCommerce marketing strategies, data visualization is important because it allows your team to conceptualize and grasp large amounts of information. You can pull complex analytics from your website and turn them into easy-to-read charts, graphs and tables anyone can read. These diagrams are not only important for helping your team understand where strengths in your strategy lie, but also where there is room for improvement.

For example, it’s one thing to point out that 36% of your customers are ordering purple shirts, 22% of them are ordering green, and so on, but it’s another thing entirely to see that information laid out in a pie chart. You can clearly see which shirt is performing the best and which shirt your store could probably do without. Ultimately, the point of these visuals is to

help your team make sense of your data. You can derive insightful conclusions from your analytics that will help you make data driven business decisions.

These visuals can also be used to aid eCommerce marketing promotions. If you know your blue shirt is performing well, tell your customers! Any digital marketing agency would tell you to share your that data with your audience to further validate your product’s popularity. For example: “Hey, this is our best-selling item and 2,000 users are already enjoying it. Buy one today! (Plus, it’s on sale from this Monday to Thursday of next week!)”

Providing information like this to your audience helps ease buyer’s guilt and pushes them along the sales funnel. Use data visualization to see your data with your own eyes and use it to refine your eCommerce marketing and business strategy.

Visual Data for Advertising

Visual data also has loads of external applications. The next time you go to craft an online marketing campaign, rather than telling your users how successful your brand is, you can clearly show your users with data visualization. Instead of using a boring old stock photography picture that shows a random stranger smiling in your advertisement, use a graph to show how many satisfied customers your business has serviced. If not a graph, use a pie chart to reveal how many people have signed up to your newsletter and how much money they’ve saved through email exclusive discounts!

The important thing to remember about using visual data in your eCommerce marketing strategy is the data has to pertain to your buyer’s journey. Show your audience information about them that they would find interesting and then get them to convert. Below are a couple of tools to help you create beautifully visualized data:

1. Google Charts are free, simple and customizable. You can create tree charts, scatter plots and, best of all, when you’re done creating your visual data, you can embed the information on your website for desktop of mobile viewing.
2. Plotly is another free open source tool that allows data scientists to showcase information in a beautiful way. This platform is also great for sharing and collaborating with other team members because you can export your plot in a ton of different formats, such as a static image, HTML file, Excel file, or a CSV.
3. Tableau is one of the most popular data visualization tools and a best friend for bloggers. Ramon Martinez, writer for a Health Intelligence blog notes that, “Tableau Public lets bloggers publish data visualizations on any topic, and make them interactive so readers can dig in.”
4. Infogram helps its users create data that dazzles. With hundreds of infographic options, Infogram makes data storytelling easy.
5. Leaflet is an easy-to-use customizable map maker. You can add markers, text or vector images to spice up your map, and its plugins make Leaflet as lightweight as possible.

While a picture is worth a thousand words, the charts and graphs you create with the tools 

above might just be worth a thousand conversions.

Visuals and Social Media

Information you’ve collected about your audience isn’t only interesting for your team, it’s interesting for them too. Post your findings as images on your social media channels or compile the visuals and create a post on your blog. Once you’ve created your content, you can also use the images for a social media series.

A great example of using data visualization for eCommerce web development on social media is with Aumcore’s #WednesdayWisdom infographic series, as shown above. This digital marketing agency uses these visuals for social media to provide insightful industry-related information to their audience while having some fun on social. Put a colorful twist on your imagery when it comes to social media and use graphics that pop. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to play around with your formatting and branding. It is social media after all.

Tip Wrap-Up

Visuals are a great tool and asset for eCommerce businesses because visuals are the name of the game for digital. With technology still largely in its infancy, users can only look at items on a screen and not experience them. Visuals help users gain a more comprehensive understanding of your products and services, and gain a deeper conceptual understanding of your business as well. Here are the tips all over again:

1. Make data driven business decisions with data visualization to clearly see where your strengths are and where your team needs to improve.
2. Leverage charts, graphs and tables for advertising purposes to let your target audience know what’s popular and what they should spend their money on.
3. Use your visuals for social media to add a playful and interactive element for your users.

Now that you understand the benefits of data visualization in eCommerce marketing and have a couple ways to implement that information, how will you expand your digital strategy? Let us know in the comments below! 

Therese Palmere is a content writer and consultant for Aumcore, a New York City based digital marketing agency that specializes in eCommerce web development and SEO services. She specializes in social media marketing and writes about everything from web design to emerging marketing trends