Category management might be the way forward, but data science is the guiding light. Over the years, data analytics has revolutionized the deliverables in all fields. This duo leads to improved effectiveness and dynamics. Data adds multi-dimensional facets to a category. Data not only helps us understand category management better but also, improve our business every passing day.
A present-day example of category management
Let us all look at Amazon or Flipkart. The number of categories they offer is immense. Furthermore, each category has many products. One has to manage those products multi-dimensionally. From their pricing to branding, the journey is long.
Now, doesn’t that look like a pile of work that can rack havoc on you? The main challenge is to maintain efficiency in category management. Only with scalable strategies, you can make this improvement. Your policy should align well with all categories in your business. But how do you come up with such plans?
Data analytics is the holy grail for your business needs. All your jobs are simplified when you get clear insights. Once you have these insights, it will be easier for you to decide your course of action and, therefore, your strategies.
Which questions can you answer with Category Analytics?
The foremost goal of category management is to optimize product categories. To achieve this, you need to simplify a products’ hierarchical distribution as well as pricing.
There are different approaches to reach this goal of optimization.
You can start with market research. However, this method involves much work and then some more re-work. All the time and workforce that goes into this converts to time wasted. This loss, in fact, is a loss for your business.
Here comes the next method- the better approach.
By using data analytics, you save both time and workforce. Moreover, it helps you make your strategies foolproof. Using data analytics, you can garner a tremendous amount of transactional data.
You can collect this data set by studying consumer behavior and factors affecting them. It can help you answer several questions. For instance,
Which ones are the most purchased products in certain areas?
How is the product distributed across a region?
What should be their prices?
What should be its hierarchy?
How to improve product range and quality?
How can data analytics in category management change your business game?
Your business’s success depends on how well you use the competitive data you acquire. While your data can come for various sources, you have to use it only for one purpose – to enhance the consumer experience. To do this, you need to tackle your category management strategy foremost. There are various ways in which data can aid this process.
1. Deal with a massive number of categories
Think of a facility like a supermarket. They can offer so many categories all at once. But when it comes to an online retail store, these many categories might pose a problem. The fundamental problem here is that of scaling the same thing on an online interface. So what solves the problem of scaling?
Your answer is data.
With data, you can establish your online store with as many categories you wish and yet, manage them easily. You can quickly deal with the critical question of the loading time of your site’s page.
Moreover, in today’s scenario of data analytics, you can customize each landing page for your customers. Without data, this colossal task would have been impossible.
2. Allow customer to choose the offers they like
Category managers focus on identifying the decision tree that consumers use. Up until now, they used only one shopping decision tree. But data has significantly changed this scenario. Now they can plan and strategize using multiple decision trees.
Again, the shopping arena these days has become very dynamic. Your customers are getting impatient. So, your end goal is to remain intuitive, quick, and effective, all at the same time.
The winning approach is changing the face of category management. It helps you create navigations paths between Search, category, and filter trio. They are thus allowing each buyer to choose their way.
Along with this, data can ease up various other things for you, like:
Data can help you understand consumer behavior. Once you know the trend, it becomes easy to choose and manage the categories and their taxonomy. Thus, it optimizes the buyer decision path.
You can automatically update all videos, product catalogs on your website, thus conserving the workforce.
One can easily tailor, invest, prioritize, and change keywords and alter category structures. You can do all this while ensuring that your data remains safe.
3. Designing live category journeys for shoppers
Each shopper is looking for something unique. To study their patterns and show results in each category is the prime goal of category management. This task seems humongous, but with data, it narrows down to a few steps. That is the beauty of data. It can easily surpass technological hurdles.
The contemporary e-commerce Platforms and CMS administration tools are the real players. These can allow you to manage and adapt visual reality on shoppers’ interface with ease. Thus very much changing your shoppers’ category experience.
4. Optimizing category performance
Marketers and Category Managers obtain data inputs from various sources. For instance, internal reports, business intelligence data, shopper insights make up huge parts of this data. Most of the time, these data sources give standalone results, which means they will be independent of each other.
But typical customer shops in amusing ways. The only way to know how their decision tree and choices function is to map these independent data onto each other. That is where a digitally equipped category manager or marketer will win the race.
Digital platforms give integrated data. With this dataset, you can quickly pinpoint sales conversion pitfalls and winning points. Moreover, it favors building scenarios and testing alternative category visions. Performance improvement decisions become foolproof when you use these many factors for decision making.
5. Handling price sensitivity
One of the foremost things that category data helps with is price comparison. It is the practice of real-time monitoring of product prices across several e-commerce platforms. You can discover the costs that your customers place their products. Consequently, you can price your products a little lower than that. Doing this helps you in eliminating competition in any category and beyond.
This real-time monitoring is the point where data sets foot into the arena. Web-scraping will help you get the data required for the pricing procedures. When it is about optimal category management, product pricing becomes a decisive factor.
So, the more data you get, the better it is for you. Moreover, if your data is real-time, it serves the purpose even better.
6. Devising promotion’s strategies
The first goal of your promotional campaign is to generate leads. Equally important is the last goal, which is to foster customer loyalty. Facilitating this journey is the crucial goal of category management. Data analytics helps in devising strategies to achieve the goal.
Your transactional data can give you the required insights to identify factors that illustrate customer loyalty. For instance, you can know how the shopper responds when their desired product is out of stock or to the discounts you offer. This data forms the metric that can help you evaluate customer loyalty and substitutability.
Once you successfully identify these factors, next comes the step to identify gaps in your promotional campaigns. Finally, you can address and fix all these loopholes. Ways of doing this can be offering discounts to keep them from going elsewhere. This process is an excellent illustration of the data-driven decision-making process.
7. New product development
As a business, it is vital to tap into new niches. With the right type of demographic data, you can identify and tap the available niches.
Besides this, many other variables can help you venture into new areas and bring in new products or change the deliverables of the existing ones. To enumerate a few, you can enlist factors driving purchase (like packaging or branding) or discover the demands of various products.
With this in mind, you can figure out the products you want to stock. Furthermore, you can place them in such a way that they don’t hinder other products in the same category.
Datahut is the place for you!
Data analytics is the elixir that category management requires. Datahut is willing to help you and your business. We are keen on extracting the right data from multiple sources whenever required. Furthermore, we refine the data to suit our specific purpose. So when it comes to any data related help, be it talking to a data expert or selecting the right service, do contact us.