(AKA: How well tuned is your eCommerce race car engine?!)
By Barry Wetmore, Senior Executive Consultant, Metrical
Part 1 of 2
In auto racing, a fast start is great, but endurance wins the race. As things inevitably go wrong during the race, the teams who win are those that can analyze and interpret all the data the car is sending back from the car and the pit and then make the right decisions. The winning team is the one proactively anticipating problems before they occur – making real-time adjustments to tip the scales in their favor.
E-commerce is much the same. Online retailers cannot afford to leave things to chance. The ‘finger in the wind’ method of figuring out how to boost sales that may have worked in the brick-and-mortar age is simply too slow and inaccurate. Winning demands a methodology and tool set that can anticipate your customer’s needs and make adjustments on the fly. This is where Metrical excels.
At the core of Metrical is a flexible, data-driven and predictive analytics engine. When properly trained on any dimension of an eCommerce digital funnel, the result is a marked increase in cart creation and conversion. It can make all the difference between staying with the pack…and winning!
Like the finely tuned Indy 500 race car – the fuel is data, and lots of it. Just like the engineers in the pits are constantly monitoring hundreds of engine performance metrics, Metrical has analyzed over 4 billion historical eCommerce data points. When activated on an ‘out of the box’ commercial platform like Shopify, or a custom-built eCommerce platform, hundreds of behavioral signals are simultaneously processed to actually predict when a cart is milliseconds away from abandonment.
But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach either. Just like a car’s performance must be tuned for specific operating conditions, the ML-based business rules driving the Metrical engine are tuned to different situations in order to enhance cart progression. In certain instances, real-time, AI-based messaging can deliver targeted engagements that can further optimize the shopping experience while balancing sales volume and margin objectives.
Just like in racing, retailers can’t leave things to chance. Gone are the ‘finger in the wind’ days of figuring out how to boost sales. Anticipating your customer’s needs and then taking action is what Metrical is all about.
