The ecommerce world is a sea of data. Data signaling intent. Data about products. Data from emails. Data from advertising. Data from marketplaces. Zero-party data. First-party data. Data from inventory systems. Data in the cloud, in Google Analytics, in email campaigns, in DMPs. Data, data, data.
But while all this data is knowable and quantifiable, it’s distributed throughout your ecosystem. Picture a cross section of a body of water: different animal and plant life in different layers, some you can see and others you can’t because it’s too dark and too unknown in the depths. In isolation, these individual data sets offer little value.
What if there was a way to corral all this data into a cohesive system and use it to build an ecommerce business that’s robust, growing, and resilient? And what if doing so was more important than ever because of the increasing difficulty in tracking and determining attribution due to Apple’s iOS changes and increased privacy regulation?
What if we told you about The Pond?
The Pond can help you manage your inventory, identify and target your highest-value customers, boost your profitability, launch better-performing campaigns, enable real-time alerts and reporting, and more. Because the truth is that there’s a lot more nuance to successful ecommerce than just looking at Google Analytics.
Successful ecommerce isn’t art; it’s science. This is an idea we’ve applied to our work at Tadpull since 2013. And our team loves science. Heck, our data science backgrounds are the basis for our success in digital marketing and analytics. The Pond is a SaaS platform rooted in the scientific method—asking questions, forming a hypothesis, then testing and analyzing a variety of data sources. We started with the basic truths we knew, and asked ourselves where we thought those might lead.
The job of the scientist and the job of The Pond are the same: unify, simplify, amplify. Unify your data because clean and organized data is key to predictive analytics; simplify your data because applying statistical models and powerful visualizations identifies hidden patterns and opportunities; and amplify your data because leveraging AI is the best way to get the most efficient customer acquisition and retention.
When you join us in The Pond, you’ll build confidence in your data, visualized in a simple and elegant way. We know that how you visualize and understand data is as important as what the data says. Since software and tools only do so much, we’ll guide you every step of the way as our ecommerce experts create data-empowered strategies to accelerate your business and free up your internal teams.
Swimming, not drowning, in high quality data
Data is a business asset, full stop. High-quality, clean data is exceptionally valuable. We truly believe a company’s data should be accounted for as a part of GAAP. It’s that essential for today’s businesses. Discovering insights with data is a two-part process: gathering and cleaning the data, and then identifying patterns in the data. To do effective machine learning, you need a ton of data to train the model and bring it to a place where it can add value. The best machine learning process on the planet won’t work without exceptional datasets to learn from.
The highest returns on your data investment and machine learning will come from your customers themselves. And while Gartner’s 2021 Personalization Survey found that 76 percent of respondents were very careful about controlling how brands collect and use their personal information, they will provide data if they know how it’s being used and if they’ll see benefits. Be transparent with personalized offers to them and reward them for their loyalty while letting AI predict who should statistically receive such recognition.
Your customer data can always be improved, and it’s a critical asset in a post-cookie world. We start all our clients with our ecommerce customer data roadmap. First, there’s the Consent and Collect stage, which prioritizes earning consent to collect data and explaining why. Then, we’ll Mix and Match, making sense of customer journeys from casual site visitor to brand evangelist. Finally, we’ll Surprise and Delight by offering unique offers and customer rewards to generate loyalty with predictive analytics. Simply put, you’ll create strategies to capture customer data in a meaningful, mutually beneficial way and better inform your business and not give away margins for loyalty with the statistics to back it up.
Having a complete view of all your data and how it ties together, you’ll begin to get a jump on your competition as only 14 percent of organizations achieve a 360-degree view of their customer, according to Gartner’s 2021 Cross-Functional Customer Data Survey. The Pond ties the customer behavior datasets together to help you identify your most profitable buyers and how to go get more of them.
Let us help you
But this isn’t a story about us. It’s a story about you and your business. It’s a story about encouraging ecommerce leaders to overcome data apathy and thrive, about finding a specific mix of marketing channels that works for your brand. That mix is different for every business. (If it was always the same, we wouldn’t exist.) And this is a story about agility and transformation in a post-pandemic world where consumers expect brands to have robust ecommerce operations.
Finding that mix together is the fun part. It starts with diagnostics on the data you have. We put together a forecast, help you think through what more and better customer data will do and how you can collect it, and how the margins can improve. We find that perfect mix for traffic: maybe it’s 60 percent through direct and SEO, 20 percent through paid ads, 20 percent through email flows. We tweak as we collect more data. We build shock absorbers for your business so changes to iOS policies, a tweak in the Facebook algorithm, whatever comes your way is a speed bump not a business-breaker. We build resiliency.
You’ll understand user journeys: how someone came in via an SMS on their mobile phone, returned later following a Google search, then purchased a product. We know the value of those specific interactions, for example quantifying exactly how much more valuable an SMS interaction is versus a Google search. You’ll know how customers arrived, what they are most likely to buy next, and their lifetime value for predicting future cash flows—on an individual basis.
The output of mixing all this data together is creating an ecommerce flywheel that drives efficiencies, value, and revenue. Better customer data enables you to run better campaigns. Better campaigns enable you to turn over better product catalogs, so you can move inventory more effectively.
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This flywheel grows revenue and profit, allowing you to put more money back into the business to secure more of your highest lifetime value customers and build a culture of making smart bets where you, not Facebook or Apple, control the game of data. The wheel spins faster and faster as more data drives more revenue.
And ultimately, together we build a predictable stream of profits on top of your datasets. Done correctly, this is an asset on par with your brand, your IP, and your people, driving the topline valuation of your business.
Jump into The Pond with us. The water’s clean and calm, and it’s always the perfect temperature for you.