“A lot of people have ideas but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer”- Nolan Bushnell. This is what perfectly describes Ms. Swati Jindal, Founder of EasyEcom, an industry-leading omnichannel inventory management and reconciliation solution for e-commerce businesses. She translates strategy into actionable goals for her company’s performance and growth as well as contributes in the implementation of organizational-wide goal setting and performance management. Ms. Swati has around a decade of working experience. She is also a doctor by education and a passionate entrepreneur. She began her professional journey with FabHealth, a consumer-focused healthcare services marketplace and moved onto Davita India, where she was primarily engaged in branding activities. In 2015, she founded EasyEcom along with Mr. Punit Gupta. Taking the lead in transforming the company to capitalise on the emerging business landscape, Ms. Swati is deeply committed to the growth of EasyEcom. She has completed her Bachelor of Dentistry from Seema Dental College and done an Executive Education Program in Social Media and Digital Marketing from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Businesses worldwide have started relying on data analysis to streamline operations and improve processes. It increases efficiency and helps identify new business opportunities that might have been otherwise overlooked, such as untapped customer segments. This means that a business that leverages data can enhance the potential for growth and profitability as it adopts an intelligence-driven model.
In today’s competitive market, a good data strategy that factors in what your business wants to achieve and offers you the right data to get you there is what can set you apart from your competitors. A study by McKinsey suggested that companies that have been leveraging consumers’ behaviour insights generally outperform their peers in sales growth by 85%. Another report by Forrester stated that 58% of “data intelligent” organizations are more likely to exceed revenue goals.
The Big Data analytics market is set to reach $103 billion by 2023.With more and more companies looking into leveraging data insights. let’s take a look at how exactly data analytics adds value to a business:
- Smarter Decision-making: Data analysis has been impacting small businesses greatly and slowly becoming the foundation for all strategic decisions. In fact, if you are not leveraging data analysis, then as a business, you might find that you are stuck at a significant disadvantage. The most important aspect for any business is identifying the right audience – data analytics can help you achieve that by gathering data from various sources and creating a demographic profile of the ideal consumers for your brand. If you are looking to decide how you can improve your current products and services, a demographic profile can help you understand what kind of features your consumers want from specific products.
- Understanding Consumer Behavior and Patterns: As mentioned earlier, understanding consumer behavior is extremely important for a business to succeed. This holds true for both brick and mortar stores as well as e-commerce businesses. If you are not selling the right products to the right people, then you are going to experience a decline in sales and revenue due to lost opportunities. Data analytics can help you segment your target customers into separate categories on the basis of demographics, attitudes and behavior, other into products or service specifics for getting these segments.
- Demand Forecasting: By using historical sales data for estimating future customer demand, data analytics can help your business with demand forecasting as well as planning accuracy. Analyzing a wide variety of external factors that generally influence customer purchase decisions and preferences, it can generate numerous insights and solutions that grant you the ability to identify potential market opportunities and also optimize your inventory.
- Pricing Intelligence: Understanding how much the target market is willing to pay for a product or service can help a business in gaining a competitive advantage. Data analytics analyzes data from various sources, including your competition, to offer you actionable insights that can be incorporated into your pricing strategy. In my experience, a clear and consolidated view of sales can help a business make strategic pricing decisions by considering factors such as product life-cycle, customer perceptions, competition, etc.
- Enhanced Performance: Streamlining business operations to make them more time-efficient is something that can be achieved by data analysis as it can provide insights into various factors such as operational cost product development, workforce planning, etc. The bottom line is that businesses can utilize it to increase their profit margins by creating more efficient processes.
- Risk Mitigation: According to Forbes, 95% of businesses today cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business. With the quantity of unstructured data available today, companies need data analytics to avoid acting in haste and making wrong (and often, costly) decisions. With access to structured data and the right strategy, businesses can mitigate risk and make better decisions. For companies that have a baseline standard in place for risk measurement, incorporating exact numbers into their decision modeling process, can help them in predicting certain scenarios and also being able to plan for them beforehand.
A data strategy indeed creates smart businesses by helping owners set clear goals and choose data sources before setting up the metrics. This makes it easier to track metrics regularly, set up the right dashboards and rope in the right people to analyze this data. Data analysis creates smart businesses by generating new opportunities. This data along with insights help to achieve business goals smartly and more efficiently. Companies that prioritize data analytics in 2022 and beyond will identify it as pivotal to product development, productivity rise and customer satisfaction.
With access to structured data, businesses can create high-quality data analytics strategies and achieve business growth. After all, effective planning, risk-evaluation, target setting and decision making is the foundation for every successful team, department and business entity.