How we harnessed the power of API endpoints to track complex sales
Learning where buyers are in the registration process by connecting multiple data streams
By ARBEN KQIKU
Data is a treasure trove of information that businesses can use to garner valuable insights into their target audiences. This allows them to make decisions based on facts rather than emotions. That said, challenges remain when it comes to consolidating data from multiple digital platforms and translating it into actionable insights.
Here’s the story of how we helped a client track conversions and build accurate buyer personas using data from an API endpoint.
Learning where customers are in the buyer journey
As is common in complex sales, becoming a client requires completing an extensive online form composed of multiple stages. A sales rep would then contact the applicant by phone or email with a view to closing the deal. However, filling in the form by itself generated a large amount of data, which could be translated into actionable insights. This would allow the company to measure key metrics, such as:
- The number of leads generated over a given time
- How many of those leads became paying clients
- Where each user was in the application process
- Learn which users were stuck in the application process
Armed with these insights, there was enormous potential for sales and support representatives to provide a more personalised customer experience. Thus the goal was to automate decision-making, based on the available data, to prioritise leads. For example, if a user had been stuck in the application process for longer than usual, the customer service team would know about it immediately and be able to act accordingly.
Breaking down the data silos to turn prospects into clients
As with any digital technology, online sales and marketing faces significant challenges when it comes to working with multiple, disparate data sources and digital platforms. In this case, we were only able to measure how many users completed the online form and at which stage of the process they were. However, since sales happened outside the website, it wasn’t immediately possible to determine how many leads actually turned into clients. Thus, using regular tracking solutions like Google Analytics wasn’t sufficient.
Another issue we needed to overcome was that the client’s platform didn’t have a system for reporting the stage of the purchase funnel each user was in. Thus, sales and customer service representatives needed to check on each customer individually, which became a major burden at scale. Together, these challenges made clear the need for an automated solution that could connect the various data sources and create dynamic buyer personas and map out the buyer journey with an outstanding degree of accuracy.
Tapping into the power of API endpoints to derive real value from data
An API endpoint is a point of entry in a communications channel linking digital platforms. In this case, we needed to create a link between the digital platform that potential clients were using to complete the application form and the one where the actual sales happened. By connecting the data sources to the backend system, the company’s sales and customer support teams would be able to easily fetch data from individual customers. Also, the marketing team would have the data necessary to build accurate buyer personas and gain full oversight of the buyer journey.
After the client created an API endpoint for us to work with, we created a script inside Google Sheets, which would retrieve data from it. The script would then clean and aggregate the data to ensure its accuracy and consistency. Then, we built a data studio dashboard that connects to the Google Sheets document and displays the data. That way, they could easily access the insights they needed, and receive hourly updates for near real-time insights.
Our solution made online form conversion tracking faster and more efficient, while providing a user-friendly reporting system to turn the data into actionable insights for sales, marketing, and customer support.
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