In this rapidly evolving world, you need a data-driven approach to understand your customers’ needs. Data analytics can change your business strategy and drives sales for your business.
Whether you’re a business owner, a sales manager or 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 that is what marketers are using to lay down marketing strategies that produce. In today’s hyper-competitive ecommerce world, you need to have a data-driven approach that informs all of your marketing and customer service efforts if you want to take your brand to the next level and have them stand apart 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 will tell you that they have more data than they know what to do with and that it hasn’t really provided them with much of a result. More often times than not, the data itself isn’t to blame in this circumstance; it’s how the data is being collected and deployed that’s the problem. If your organization fails to utilize a robust Customer Data Platform like Group FiO’s Insight Marketing Platform, you likely have two strikes against you before you even get up to bat:
1) your data is disparate, stuck in department silos where it might benefit departmental operations, but isn’t providing the entire brand ecosystem with valuable customer insight and
2) 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 and every customer.
Without these two crucial pieces to the customer analytics pie, your brand is missing the picnic. Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Their needs must be met, and they must be treated as being essential to achieve the kind of customer satisfaction that builds real customer loyalty. Consumers are more informed and far more opinionated than ever, and with endless information available at their fingertips in seconds, they can be easily influenced by one another. If you want 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 that are influenced by the choices your customers make. Everybody ends up happy!
Data from every step of the customer experience can help businesses strategize their marketing and sales efforts and lead generating strategies. Leveraging patterns in customer behavior through analytics can create a business map from a customer journey that is 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 that focus on the “why” as much as the “when” and “who” thrive. Before long, it will grow 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, back when traditional one-way mass marketing communication was not only still a thing, but the only thing, personalization and customer experience didn’t really matter so much Back then, companies could get away with segmenting customers using primarily demographic and firmographic traits such as age, gender, income, ethnicity, occupation, industry, company size, geographic location etc.
In other words, focusing exclusively on the “who”.
There’s no arguing the importance of understanding who your customers are. Today, developing customer personas and ideal customer profiles are undoubtedly vital practices for understanding our target customers and for effective customer journey mapping. But in the customer-centric world we live in today, just understanding “who” your customers are doesn’t cut it.
3 Ways to Drive ROI with Customer Behavior Data & Analytics
From customer acquisition to customer retention and loyalty, wherever the opportunities or challenges may lie, cutting-edge modern 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. The path to purchase typically involves many different touchpoints across multiple channels, over an extended period of time that can often span weeks, months or in some cases even years.
Forrester’s State of Marketing Report found that 67% percent of marketing leaders say creating a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is critical to the success of their overall marketing strategy.
However, the report also shed light on the fact that this is much easier said than done. For most marketers, 51% of campaign messages are still identical broadcasts from one channel to the next.
The majority of marketers also struggle to effectively align teams and strategies with the customer journey, citing difficulties such as: lacking a single view of the customer, fragmented data sources, and budgetary constraints as top obstacles getting in the way.
Increased Customer Demand for Personalization
This complex, multi-channel, multi-touchpointjourney is also driven entirely by the individual customer, whose motivations, goals, values and requirements can differ completely from those of the customer to their right and to their left traveling along the same path – all of whom demand personalization.
A couple statistics from the same Forrester report underscore the extent of customers’ demand for personalization:
52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications
65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if a vendor doesn’t personalize communications to their company
As customers take various journeys to achieve their unique goals, you can monitor performance and measure journey success or failure. Over time, patterns in behavioral data emerge that may explain those outcomes. Using journey analytics, CX or marketing teams can easily identify what caused some to succeed and blocked others from reaching their goal.
Armed with these valuable insights, you can leverage journey orchestration software to optimize personalization decisions across touchpoints. These solutions help you ensure that every offer or message reflects every prospect’s or customer’s overall experience with your organization, is relevant to their current journey and helps them achieve their next goal.
2. Use Customer Behavior Data to Increase Customer Retention
According to research, 67% of customers report bad experiences as a reason for churn, but only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain.
91% of those unhappy non-complainers simply leave.
Of the few that do actually complain, by the time they get around to it, it’s often already too late.
The lesson here is that you can’t rely on your customers to raise a red flag in order to accurately gauge customer experience, satisfaction, or to predict churn and retention.
You can, however, often spot the red flags through a customer’s behaviors and, with proper analytics, make sure signs of trouble are picked up on your radar early, so there is still time to act. As they say, actions speak louder than words (especially when unhappy customers often don’t even say anything.)
Not receiving enough value from a product or service can be another leading cause of churn that customers often won’t complain about, and that can be difficult to detect. Without customer behavior analytics and segmentation, that is.
3. Use Customer Behavior Data to Drive Customer Growth and Expansion
dividual customers may have a higher likelihood of converting on particular cross-sell, up-sell or repeat purchase offers at certain times, but they might not know that you have something they want, and often don’t even know exactly what it is 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.”
Of course, the key is to introduce the right offers to the right customers at the right times, not everything to everyone all the time.
Regardless of your company or industry, the same high-level concept behind Amazon’s infamous “customers who (blank) also (blank)” recommendation call-to-actions can be applied to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities through machine learning and predictive analytics.
For it’s product suggestions, Amazon’s recommendation algorithm (the one responsible for driving 35% of their revenue) 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
But, depending on your business, there are many different possible behavioral data points and sources that can be leveraged for this. Many of these are probably already hiding in isolated corners of your existing technology stack, which brings us back to the need for the “central repository of truth.” In other instances however, 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 FiO’s Insight Marketing Platform is so 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 if you’re smart enough to pay close attention by capturing, analyzing and acting on customer behavior data.
Whether you’re already trying to utilize Customer Analytics to increase you’re ROI or are a complete novice when it comes to data analytics, Group FiO can help. Contact Us TODAY to find out more about how we can help you stay competitive and start using customer analytics to boost ROI. Click Here to schedule a demo or find out more information.