How Can Sentiment Analysis Boost Your E-Commerce Sales?
Imagine this- your prospects and customers come up to you and tell you how you can improve your products and business in a manner that motivates them to purchase more and more often. Sounds like a dream right? Well, it isn’t a dream.
Your customers and prospects are already telling you this stuff in the form of social media posts, comments, blog posts, and most importantly, user reviews. All you need to do is listen. To do this intelligently, in a manner that doesn’t just improve your business’ bottom line but also how it is perceived by your target audience, you need sentiment analysis.
Want to know more? Let’s jump right in.
What Is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis, in simple terms, is the process of understanding what your customers and prospects think about your brand, and/or, the products or services you offer. The advent of the Internet has enabled customers to express their opinions about every aspect of their lives, including their experiences with the businesses they interact with.
From a business owner’s perspective, these opinions are a goldmine of data. It can be used to understand what your customers expect and want from your business, or what they don’t. These insights can be used to improve every aspect of your sales cycle effectively.
From the very first time a prospect interacts with your business, to the time they place their second, third, or hundredth order, customer sentiment can help you improve the experience for them. This improvement, in turn, will reflect on your business’s bottom line.
Still wondering how? Live dive a little deeper.
Sentiment Analysis And Sales
Sentiment analysis is one of the highest-priority tasks for almost every major eCommerce brand on the planet, and for good reason. When done correctly, sentiment analysis can inject and maintain a significant boost in any brand’s sales.
Personalized Shopping Experiences
Sentiment analysis allows brands to listen to their customers’ expectations. By listening in on individual opinions, businesses can obtain critical information that can be used to convert prospects to customers in a smart way. This is because individual customer opinions can be used to personalize online shopping experiences. Personalized product recommendations, upgrades and marketing messages (emails, push notifications, chatbot conversations, and more) can all contribute to better conversion rates and more sales.
Improved Ratings
This one is a no-brainer. Sentiment analysis shows businesses where they are lacking in terms of customer experience.
Using this information to work on areas of improvement and address customer/prospect grievances can lead to better product and business ratings, and in the realm of online sales, positive ratings and reviews are worth their weight in gold.
An overwhelming majority of online shoppers base their purchase decisions on ratings and reviews. Sentiment analysis allows businesses to work on negative reviews and improve their ratings online, resulting in a healthier bottom line.
Returning Customers
People love it when businesses listen to them. This is especially true for customers who have paid their hard-earned money to a business in exchange for their product or service. If a business has listened to feedback from a customer and incorporated it into their service or product offering, they are sure to consider returning to their business. Returning customers are one of the best sources of revenue for any business. They cost next to nothing to acquire and still deliver as much, if not more, revenue to your business as a fresh customer.
More Benefits Of Sentiment Analysis
While higher sales are a good enough reason to support the high priority placed on sentiment analysis, it is not the only one. Sentiment analysis, when done correctly, can deliver long term benefits that go beyond the balance sheet of your business.
Improved Customer Experience
It’s not hard to imagine how sentiment analysis helps improve customer experience. You listen to your customers talking about your brand on social media, in reviews, and in other places on the web, and draw insights. Use these insights to give your customers or prospects what they want and you’ll find you have created an experience that your customers love.
Better Brand Image
What does a delightful customer experience lead to? Besides improved sales, it leads to an improvement in the brand’s image or brand sentiment. A better brand image, in turn, results in customer loyalty, improved conversions, free word-of-mouth marketing, and in some cases, even makes it easier to attract better talent in your ranks.
Create Better Products And Services
Knowing what your customers want is almost a superpower. While sentiment analysis can help businesses improve customer experiences and address grievances in real-time, there are also other long-term benefits associated with the undertaking. In this case, sentiment analysis can help businesses create better products. You can include features and functionalities that your current products are missing, but your customers desire, with sentiment analysis.
Sentiment Analysis- Implementation Strategies For Success
In order to ensure your efforts into sentiment analysis bring about the desired results, it is important to do it right. You can ensure the same by keeping the following tips in mind:
Choose The Right Tool
Insights from your sentiment analysis should seamlessly fit into your eCommerce strategy. To achieve that, you need the right tool. Depending on the nature of eCommerce products you sell, the underlying technology of your website and your technical expertise, you can choose between machine learning and rule-based tools.
While choosing a tool, it is important to strike the right balance between having the desired features and having a tool that’s user friendly. Striking a balance between the sophistication of a tool and the user-friendliness of the insights it delivers is important to deal with perplexity issues that are commonly associated with sentiment analysis.
Managing Burstiness
Burstiness, or sudden spike in activity, is a common phenomenon in the eCommerce industry. Your sentiment analysis tool and process should be designed to manage this burstiness and deliver actionable insights consistently.
The Understated Importance Of Human Intervention
In most cases, sentiment analysis is primarily powered by tools that use machine learning or AI or rule-based systems. While these tools are indispensable in the sentiment analysis process, they are not enough to handle the entire process single-handedly. Remember, regardless of how good your sentiment analysis tools are, you are, at the end of the day, dealing with data about human behavior. For this reason, you need a human or a team of humans for sentiment monitoring, to ensure you are getting the results you desire.
Conclusion
In today’s age of information, sentiment analysis is not an optional undertaking, especially for eCommerce businesses. Such businesses already thrive on data from ads, user behavior on websites and conversion rate optimization efforts and sentiment analysis is an important addition to this suite of data.
Published on techybusinesses.