In this rapidly evolving world, you need a data-driven approach to understand your customers’ needs. Data analytics can change your business strategy and drive sales for your business.
Whether you’re a business owner, a sales manager, or a marketing director, you are likely aware of the current data revolution happening across businesses. Organizations and businesses receive huge amounts of data every day, and marketers are using this data to develop effective marketing strategies. In today’s hyper-competitive ecommerce world, a data-driven approach that informs all your marketing and customer service efforts is essential to elevate your brand and distinguish it from the competition.
Why is Data Analytics The Key to Driving Revenue?
First, analyzing data is all about the quality of your data tools and procedures. Many brands claim to have more data than they can manage and that it hasn’t yielded significant results. Often, the issue lies not with the data itself but with how it is collected and deployed. If your organization fails to utilize a robust Customer Data Platform like AiinteleKt’s Insight Marketing Platform, you likely have two strikes against you before you even get up to bat:
- Your data is disparate, stuck in department silos where it might benefit departmental operations but doesn’t provide the entire brand ecosystem with valuable customer insights.
- You lack a “central repository of truth,” a single customer data hub where all consumer intel is stored and analyzed to provide one single view of each customer.
Without these two crucial pieces, your brand is missing out. Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Their needs must be met, and they must be treated as essential to achieving the kind of customer satisfaction that builds real customer loyalty. Consumers are more informed and opinionated than ever, with endless information available at their fingertips. To thrive in a competitive world with such knowledgeable customers, you need to have a keen understanding of customer behavior. Customer analytics helps you make informed business decisions based on the choices your customers make, ensuring everyone is satisfied.
Data from every step of the customer experience can help businesses strategize their marketing, sales efforts, and lead generation strategies. Leveraging patterns in customer behavior through analytics can create a business map tailored to specific customers.
Why is Behavioral Data Such an Important Part of Customer Analytics?
In a digital world where customer-centricity, personalization, and customer experience separate the winners from the losers, it’s no coincidence that companies focusing on the “why” as much as the “when” and “who” thrive. Before long, it will become increasingly difficult to compete in any industry for those who are too slow to adopt a customer-centric, behavioral data-driven approach.
Before the digital age, when traditional one-way mass marketing communication was the norm, personalization and customer experience didn’t matter as much. Companies could segment customers using primarily demographic and firmographic traits such as age, gender, income, ethnicity, occupation, industry, company size, and geographic location. This approach focused exclusively on the “who”.
While understanding who your customers are remains essential, developing customer personas and ideal customer profiles are vital practices for understanding target customers and effective customer journey mapping. However, in today’s customer-centric world, just understanding “who” your customers are doesn’t cut it.
3 Ways to Drive ROI with Customer Behavior Data & Analytics
From customer acquisition to retention and loyalty, wherever opportunities or challenges may lie, cutting-edge organizations use customer behavior data to bring them to light. Together with modern analytics approaches such as customer journey analytics, behavioral data can be leveraged to solve problems and impact KPIs at every stage of the customer journey.
1. Use Customer Behavior Data to Improve Customer Acquisition
The modern customer journey is incredibly complex, typically involving many different touchpoints across multiple channels over an extended period that can span weeks, months, or even years. Forrester’s State of Marketing Report found that 67% of marketing leaders say creating a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is critical to their overall marketing strategy’s success. However, 51% of campaign messages are still identical broadcasts from one channel to the next, highlighting the challenge marketers face in aligning teams and strategies with the customer journey due to a lack of a single view of the customer, fragmented data sources, and budgetary constraints.
Customers demand personalization more than ever. According to Forrester, 52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications, and 65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if a vendor doesn’t personalize communications to their company.
Using journey analytics, CX or marketing teams can monitor performance and measure journey success or failure. Over time, patterns in behavioral data emerge that may explain these outcomes. With valuable insights, you can leverage journey orchestration software to optimize personalization decisions across touchpoints, ensuring that every offer or message reflects the customer’s overall experience with your organization and is relevant to their current journey.
2. Use Customer Behavior Data to Increase Customer Retention
Research shows that 67% of customers report bad experiences as a reason for churn, but only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. Instead, 91% of these unhappy non-complainers simply leave. This indicates that relying on customers to raise red flags to gauge customer experience or predict churn and retention is insufficient.
However, you can often spot red flags through customer behaviors. With proper analytics, early signs of trouble can be detected, allowing time to act. Actions speak louder than words, especially when unhappy customers don’t always express their dissatisfaction.
Not receiving enough value from a product or service can also cause churn, which customers often don’t complain about and can be difficult to detect without customer behavior analytics and segmentation.
3. Use Customer Behavior Data to Drive Customer Growth and Expansion
Individual customers may have a higher likelihood of converting on particular cross-sell, up-sell, or repeat purchase offers at certain times. However, they might not know that you have something they want and often don’t know exactly what they want themselves. As Steve Jobs once said, “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
The key is to introduce the right offers to the right customers at the right times. Regardless of your company or industry, the high-level concept behind Amazon’s recommendation call-to-actions can be applied to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities through machine learning and predictive analytics. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm uses customer behavior data such as:
- A user’s purchase history
- Items in their shopping cart
- Items they’ve rated and liked
- What other customers have viewed and purchased
Depending on your business, many different behavioral data points and sources can be leveraged. Many of these are probably already hiding in isolated corners of your existing technology stack, underscoring the need for a “central repository of truth.” In other instances, this might be data you’re not capturing at all, and if you don’t have it, you can’t leverage it. This is why having a data-driven CDP like AiinteleKt’s Insight Marketing Platform is crucial.
Conclusion
Your customer’s behaviors can reveal valuable information about your customers, your business, and the relationship between the two that you can’t find anywhere else. By capturing, analyzing, and acting on customer behavior data, you can gain insights that drive revenue and enhance customer satisfaction.
Whether you’re already utilizing customer analytics to increase your ROI or are a complete novice when it comes to data analytics, AiinteleKt can help. Contact us TODAY to learn how we can help you stay competitive and start using customer analytics to boost ROI.
Are you interested in diving deeper into your retail marketing challenges? Schedule a 30-minute chat with one of our specialists. We can review your unique situation and suggest approaches that can set you on the path to success