Companies now have access to more data than ever thanks to the development of the internet. To find trends and new patterns in consumer behavior, numerous online networks and platforms use data gathered from customers. Regardless of the industry in which a company operates, critically analyzing and utilizing the value of consumer data can give the business a competitive edge that will help it stand out from the crowd.
For instance, a business that sells organic skin care products can identify the best-performing item. A company that sells high-end goods may develop the knowledge to target a different market. Data can be used by a business to determine whether or not its price points are appealing to its target market.
Customer data can assist managers and owners in staying current with changing patterns, regardless of the corporate and business strategy of the company. Basic customer information, behavioral trends, and even attitude tendencies can all be gleaned from customer data to help the business make important decisions.
Customer Data Types
No matter the kind of data gathered, the main goal is to better understand the needs of the customer because, after all, he or she is king!
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Basic Data
Basic data are the summary statistics provided by a customer. A new client provides basic information when they enter their name, email address, phone number, or residential address. Additionally, it may contain specific data like annual income, location, and affiliated organizations.
By doing this, a company will have a way to connect with a customer, launching marketing initiatives, and eventually identifying the most effective ways to engage with them throughout the customer journey.
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Interaction Data
Data from interactions reveals a little more about how a customer interacts with a good or service. It reveals the behavior of a customer when a website, email, or marketing campaign is displayed to them.
Interaction data includes things like pageviews, link clicks, bounce rates, email opens, and downloads. Customers’ actions are tracked when they interact with content, and this information can be used to improve landing pages and boost customer acquisition and retention rates.
A company can improve content and marketing tactics to reenergize customer engagement throughout the buying process and improve the customer experience.
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Behavioral Data
Similar to interaction data, behavioral data focuses on understanding what customers do with a product or service and when they take action that can be measured. What goods or services does the client use, and how do they use it? What stage of the customer journey does a typical customer register, add items to their cart, make a purchase, abandon checkout, or finish their transaction?
Any time a customer takes an action to interact with a company’s product or service further is included in behavioral data. With the aid of this data category, a business can more precisely target its ideal client and develop audiences that look like them.
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Attitude Data
What people believe, desire, and feel about a good or service is known as attitude data. The way a customer behaves can reveal a lot about what they want, the problems they have, and whether or not their service meets those needs.
Surveys, focus groups, and A/B testing are frequently used to gather attitudinal data from the target audience.
Accept that big data is for the present and future for online businesses!
People must come to reality and agreement with the fact that it is good to choose big data because of its volume and business it can generate. The first step to extract valuable customer data is to acknowledge that good data is “in there somewhere” and to have the willingness to mine through it.
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Decide on your most crucial customer segments.
Your customer data allows you to divide your clientele into different groups and pinpoint which are most crucial to your business. Behavioral segmentation is one of the most reliable types for eCommerce businesses that want to achieve customer-centricity and focus on more intelligent acquisition and retention, while demographic, psychographic, and geographic segmentation allows fine-tuning of your marketing campaigns. By considering regency, frequency, and monetary value, many online businesses use RFM segmentation to pinpoint the most valuable customer segments. Looking at transactional data enables you to determine the value of each variable. The RFM data must be gathered, each value must be given a score, and customer segments must be based on those results.
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Bring in and keep more valuable clients.
Knowing your most significant customer segments will help you become more successful at luring in and keeping the right clients. For sustained growth, recurring high-value customers are crucial, so you should base your marketing and sales strategies on them.
You can make better custom and lookalike audiences for your paid advertising campaigns and email marketing initiatives based on the information you already have about your top customers. You can use your budget wisely, improve the effectiveness of your advertising, and design better email campaigns to help you achieve your marketing and sales objectives by creating better target audiences.
You can increase your chances of attracting new customers who are likely to become repeat, high-value customers by building lookalike audiences based on your best customers. You can fine-tune your onboarding, reactivation, and churn prevention campaigns if you want to increase customer retention by creating a variety of custom audiences.
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Improves onboarding to promote repeated sales
After expending your resources on acquiring new, high-potential customers, you need to succeed with your onboarding campaigns to justify your investment. You must ensure that the first customer experience is up to par with what you promised and your recent customers expect if you want to encourage the second purchase.
Your essentials for an onboarding campaign are:
- Thank you, and please confirm via email.
- Welcome to the community
- NPS before delivery
- Educational materials
- Delivery confirmation
It would help if you concentrated on avoiding buyer’s remorse, inspiring favorable feelings, and fostering trust during this stage. All of these components raise the likelihood that your first-time customers will make another purchase from you.
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Personalize shopping experience
You can personalize user and customer experiences across various channels with customer data, especially first- and zero-party data. Your level of customer experience will rise, and you’ll observe that people are more engaged with your brand if you gather customer data and have the technology to produce dynamic and timely content and recommendations.
To increase personalization, establish a standardized method for gathering customer information and incorporating it into your strategies.
Make it simple for your team to gather, and incorporate it naturally into your audience communications.
Personalization is a necessary component of VIP treatment.
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To avoid churn, keep customers interested between purchases.
Customers don’t suddenly disappear. There are several warning signs or signals that you can spot in the customer behavioral data before they permanently leave you. Think about NPS surveys and other customer satisfaction metrics.
For your churn prevention campaigns, the responses you collect from your customers’ surveys represent genuine feedback about their experiences. Churn can be avoided significantly by having your customer support team respond in real-time. The likelihood of getting a new order from one of your existing customers decreases as time goes on without a new purchase.
Utilizing RFM segmentation will simplify monitoring segment dynamics and ensure that there are as few at-risk customers as possible.
Churn is inevitable for any business, it becomes problematic when it could have been prevented.
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Have a unified view of the data about customers
Data unification can greatly impact how your teams communicate with your customers. Other solutions you use for your eCommerce, such as website personalization or automated email marketing flows, can make use of the data you collect in your customer data platform.
Creating dynamic customer experiences for an online business is crucial because it will help you stand out through meaningful communication and recommendations when your clients need you most.
When you have the tools to fully utilize the enormous potential of all that data, don’t let it go to waste.
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Based on customer data, enhance real-time response
You are more likely to positively affect customer satisfaction and retention rates when you sync your follow-up flows with the responses from your customers. You need clean, current data to maximize those micro-moments and create interactive experiences.
Consider how quickly your customer support team will respond. You can prevent uncomfortable situations that could damage your relationship and generate unfavorable word-of-mouth if you respond promptly to customer satisfaction feedback.
Despite having just received a low satisfaction rating, you have a better chance of keeping that customer satisfied if you spot the issues early on.
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Leverage a unique set of customer data accessible only to your company
The beginning of improving customer relationships is where marketing automation and data management meet. You have a data set that is specific to your company and goes beyond just your customer base.
It’s not always a bad thing that third-party data is getting less and less trustworthy.
Third-party data is significantly less valuable than what you already know about your customers and what your first- and zero-party data reveals.
Only you can use this resource to differentiate your online business from the competition since your rivals are unable to use it.
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Analyze customer data to discover the characteristics that your customers share.
Utilize this knowledge to not only design remarkable experiences, but also to forge a vibrant community focused on the same goals and values around your brand.
“Building a community is one of the few distinctive things competitors can’t copy,”
Value Extraction from Customer Data
There are five ways to extract and use customer data effectively.
Businesses need to develop the skill of sorting through mountains of online data to find ways to use customer data to target their pain points.
Here are some ways businesses can have their cake and eat it, too!
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Knowing the strength of Personnel
Access to millions of bytes of data can be overwhelming when using big data. Large companies can hire a specialized team to transform this raw data into comprehensible graphs and reports that managers and supervisors can use to create brand strategies that will work in their favor. Numerous management platforms are designed specifically to classify data for businesses.
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Purchase analytics software
For organizations dealing with customer services, platforms like Google, for instance, offer analytical software that further organizes data into comprehensible chunks.
Once you realize the value and potential of data for your company, you’ll want to invest in as many technical information-decoding tools as you can. There are numerous analytical solutions available on the market for small, medium, and large businesses depending on their financial capabilities.
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Making use of historical data
Businesses can use historical information, such as case studies, to draw important conclusions from earlier years. Using this information, managers can forecast the future of the company by analyzing historical trends.
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Analyze Client Churn
The rate at which customers or clients switch from being loyal customers to doing business elsewhere is referred to as “client churn.” It is yet another area where big data and analytics can significantly alter outcomes. This process involves analyzing your user data to draw conclusions about why some customers stick around while others only support your company for a limited time before leaving.
You can learn how to keep more customers and generate more steady profits by analyzing the specifics of your client churn.
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Use Social Media As a Data Source
Social media is a fabulous place to attract customers and hear what they are thinking right now. The use of hashtags and other challenges increases customer engagement, enables businesses to take advantage of other marketing trends, and enhances the value of customer data
Based on the popularity of their social media content, many businesses have also risen to the top of their respective industries.
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Automate Operations
The process of automation aids top management in streamlining the operations of the entire business and its divisions. Businesses are encouraged by automation to offer better day-to-day operations and customer service. Additionally, it functions well in situations where there is a large amount of data because it allows the business to extract the pertinent data and customer data.