Introduction to Customer Data
Companies spend a huge amount of money on marketing every year. Through various sources, they gather extraordinarily rich data. Marketers love such data. But the surprising truth is that a large percentage of us are ignoring the most valuable customer data sources that are available. Many organizations collect and store data about the customers, but they don’t use it efficiently to improve their business. They have data but they don’t have a clear idea of what to do with it. This is where the need for Customer analytics arises.
What is Customer Data?
It is any kind of information you possess which indicates how the customers are using your product or service and interact with your brand. Such data is useful for understanding the customers and their user experience with your product and service.
Importance of Customer Data
Here are a few reasons listed why it is more important to a business:
- Helps to design a better product.
- Lets you increase your conversions.
- You can attract more audience knowing their expectations.
- Helps to have good communication with the customers.
- Helps the business people to provide excellent customer service.
Customer Data Analytics
Let’s take that your business is customer focused and you have collected some data about your customers. Then this is a great thing. An answer to yourself for a few questions like
- Does your business use that data effectively?
- Are you taking any steps to derive more value from the collected data?
- In what all ways the data can be used to improve your business?
It is also the process and technology that gives the organizations the necessary customer knowledge which will help them to make key decisions. It is also called Customer Data Analytics. Customer analytics will help to convert yours into something useful. It will help to improve your business faster and smarter.
The main aim of customer data analytics is to create an accurate view of the customer for the business to work with and make future decisions about attracting more customers and retaining them. It is considered as the backbone of most of the marketing activities. Customer data analytics contains techniques such as predictive modeling, data visualization, information management, and segmentation.
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Importance of Customer Data Analytics
It is becoming more important these days because of the following reasons:
- It is becoming more empowered and connected
- They are more exposed to information anytime and anywhere in the purchase place, price, product comparison, and others.
- It will help to predict the customer’s behavior so that you can make decisions accordingly
- You can understand the customer’s purchase habits and lifestyle preferences
- You can know which source creates most of the customers
- It will help to leverage your business
- Helps to deliver a great customer experience
Benefits of Customer Data Analytics
- Increase response rate
- Increases the number of loyal customers and thus, in turn, increases the ROI
- It reduces the marketing costs by targeting only those customers who will respond to your ad
- Reduces the pressure by knowing what the customers will expect and what will be their purchase behavior in advance
- Helps in segmenting the customers more effectively
- Helps in understanding the targeted customer’s group more effectively
Getting Customer Data Platform
Customer data platform can be gathered in an organization in various ways. Few are listed below:
1. Customer Data Platform
This platform is the pulse of the customers. They are the team that is leveraged when something goes wrong but they are rarely visited by the management. Customer service team will know the answers to questions like
- What are the customer’s expectations?
- What are they demanding more?
- What is their purchase pattern?
So always have a meeting with these platforms and go through their customer records and reports. Their customer data platform will be used to steer the marketing tests.
2. Customer Advisory Boards
Customer Advisory board has a list of all the past and present customers. You can post a question and get feedback from all the customers. This feedback will form importance which will help you to position your product and do marketing campaigns. If you change anything about your brand or product let the customers know about that first. You can know how much the product will be successful from their feedback. You should contact the customers often through a phone call or send them ad-hoc emails. Feedback is an important criterion.
3. Customer Data Profiles
This is very important but it is also a little tricky. Companies and marketing people should understand the value of a registered member. Companies often fail to use such data for persona building, customer knowledge and campaigns.
The customer data profiles should include basic information like billing information, general bio information. They should also ask a few questions to the customers like
- What is their expectation?
- What did they want to read or learn?
- What is their favorite product?
- If any product should be tailored as per their needs?
These profiles should not only be used for the purpose of getting information, it should also help the business to serve their customer data management. It will attract more products and create more value for them.
13 Ways to Improve your Organization’s Potential
The most important step to improve your organization’s potential is to give the best customer experience. Measuring and increasing the effectiveness of the collected customer data will help you to deliver great customer experience. You should first answer these two questions to effectively use your customer data
- How are the internal sources in the organization connected to store the customer data?
- Is the data easily accessible and helps you to make better decisions?
But still, there are a lot of challenges faced by organizations in storing and using more effectively and efficiently. So let’s look at the 13 ways to make the best out of your customer data are given below:
1. Deliver a More Personalized Shopping Experience
By maximizing the use of customer data a business can deliver a more personalized shopping experience to its customers. It can inform its customers about the special offers and discounts that are available to them. It can maximize opportunities to increase their profit. Companies who use Brick and Mortar system can use their customer data to improve their customer’s in-store experience.
Using customer location data a company can decide which area to be focussed more on selling a particular product. They can also segment customers based on other factors.
2. Customize the Promotions and Special Discounts
Proper analyzing of customer’s data will help the business to provide customized offers and appropriate marketing. Loyal customers are always the most profitable customers. Through customer analytics companies can provide long-term customer loyalty and increase their profit. The analysis should be made on which channel brings more customers to the business and steps should be taken to improve that channel. Right promotion at the right channel gives more happy customers and high profit.
3. Pick your North Metric Star and be Thoughtful
You should choose what metric you should focus on. Choosing the exact metric will let you focus on what to track and what tools to be used to measure and improve the data. Some organizations track everything and get confused finally. To start with, select a track and list the questions which are to be answered through the analysis. Name the track events and follow the consistency. Add new events when you have new questions.
4. Improve your Products or Services
Through Customer Analytics a company can easily identify which product is most liked by the customers and what price they are willing to pay for it. You can also get feedback from the customers regarding the products or services. Using such feedback and reviews the company can improve the experience. The company can also use customer data to identify the most relevant users to get feedback on their products.
5. Improve your Marketing
Customer data will help to segment the customers based on several factors like region, price range, and others. The companies can define marketing strategies based on this data. Such marketing campaign will be more effective and will also reach the target audience. Thus, in turn, it increases the sales of the product or service and brings in more profit.
6. Provide Better Customer Service
Use customer data like purchase history or support history to provide better customer experience. Customer call support and mail support will also help the organization to create a mass amount of data in real time.
7. Use Customer Data to Create New Product or Services
Through customer analytics, the company can know the expectations of the customers towards their product. It will help the company to develop new products that will fulfill the expectations of the customers. This will increase sales and improve the profit of the business.
8. Reduce Risk and Fraud
Through analysis of customer data such as customer behavior and customer churn rates organization can take efforts to maximize their efficiency and reduce the risk and fraud taking place in the organization.
9. Create Shareable Content
The data you have gathered from customers through surveys can be converted into an attractive and well-designed infographic. This infographic can be shared on social media sites like Twitter and others. They can also be used for marketing purpose and can be posted on blogs for driving traffic to the site.
10. Customer Experience Matrix
The customer experience matrix will help you to find out the extent of the company’s interaction with the customers and the effectiveness of the customer data. Both these things will help you to understand the kind of customer experience a business offers to its customers.
The customer matrix as seen in the picture below explains four kinds of customer experience
On the left of the X-axis, you can see the companies with poor customer data. Such companies have disconnected method of storing data and so provides poor customer experience.
On the right of the X-axis. you can see the companies who are using their customer data more effectively. They have connected methods of storing data. All the details of the customers are stored in a single queried system which is easily accessible. In such companies, if any question arises regarding the customer data it brings actionable insights and answers.
11. Define Interests
One great idea to discover about your customers is to define group or categories of interests that are relevant to your brand or business. After defining you should create a relationship like which customer will fit which group. If a particular pattern is seen to be recurring then you can focus on that particular interest or category to maximize your business or marketing campaign.
12. Look for Gaps between Interests and Products
Cross-check the interest data with how a customer has engaged with your product. This will help you to know the gap. You can have different categories of interest for a particular range of products. If there is no conversion made or no purchase or subscription from that particular category of interest, then the organization can take a step to up-sell or re-engage the products.
13. Target People who are More Likely to Convert
Behavioral tracking and social login tracking can help you to target the relevant people for your product or service. Relevant interests and patterns within a particular group can also increase the conversion rate.
Conclusion
If each piece of data collected from the customer is linked to the business in some way it will help to make decisions and improve the business. Customer data becomes useless if it is stored in disconnected systems. Thus customer data has to be used in an effective way to bring in more customers and to improve the business.
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