With competition heating up in almost all industries, companies need to change their marketing strategies to know their customers in a better way. Understanding the consumer helps companies alter their campaigns to focus on their target audience. It also enables organisations to find a customer’s exact needs and why they behave the way they do. But it is not easy knowing the customers who are scattered around different locations and come from different backgrounds. This is where customer analytics can play a major role. Using past and present data, firms can know more about their customers.
It brings us to wonder what exactly customer analytics is. One can find the answer to this by joining the Advanced Executive Certificate Course In Product Management. The details of this course are available on our website. Through this article, we will try to understand this process and how companies must perform it to get the desired results.
What Is Customer Analytics?
Customer analytics is collecting customer data and analysing it to arrive at insights that help you make better decisions. A company generates vast data through its interactions with customers at various touchpoints. This data helps understand customer behaviour. Such information helps companies know which advertising platform gives them the best returns. Analytics also helps to track the customer journey and create personalised marketing campaigns. Beyond making smart decisions, this process also helps improve the bottom lines of firms that use it.
Some of the common analytics to measure are:
Google Analytics Data – This refers to how customers research a product and what drives them to the website.
Email Marketing Metrics – Measuring open and click-through rates reveal customers’ engagement with your content.
Digital Marketing Metrics – Find out how engaged customers are with blogs and whether they sign forms.
Website Traffic – Measuring this tells you how much time customers spend on the website and how many leave immediately after entering the site.
Why Do Companies Need Customer Analytics?
Knowing the customer and giving them what they want helps to improve customer satisfaction and retention. When you know your customer well, the cost of lead generation and conversions comes down drastically. The company’s sales go up with every satisfied customer, resulting in better revenues and profits. Brand awareness is very important for companies to attract customers. Performing customer analytics helps the organisation improve its brand awareness. It also promotes better customer engagement, resulting in an enhanced experience. All these are possible only because the company has the necessary information about their customers.
There are other reasons for performing customer analytics. When this is done, the firm can create more personalised marketing campaigns targeted at different customer segments. The company can reduce the sales cycle by understanding the customer buying process using customer journey analytics. Analytics is a great help when the company develops a new product or adds features to an existing item. Knowing the customers’ preferences through analysis helps the organisation create a better product that will excite the buyers. The customer service team can predict and reduce churn using this process.
How To Perform Customer Analytics?
- Know The Objective
Before you start performing customer analytics, you must know your goals. You must first decide what objectives you wish to achieve with this process. It is true for businesses of all sizes and natures. The next step is to see how your products satisfy their needs. You must know what pain points your customers have. It is c to find out if some issues cause distress to customers and how you can solve them. Another important information you must have is the factor that will make customers come back to you.
- Collect Data
The next step is to collect relevant data for the analysis you want to conduct. When you are clear about the objective, it is easy to know what data you must collect. The most common method of collecting customer data is to review transactional histories. These give a huge amount of information about the customer’s behaviour. Another method of collecting data for customer analytics is to conduct surveys. Companies can also offer an incentive for customer feedback. Social media is another place organisations can find a lot of customer information.
- Analyse Data
Once you have collected and prepared the data, the next thing is to conduct the actual customer analytics. You can start with visualisations because it helps you locate the outliers and patterns. These will point to the correct data analytics techniques and modelling. The visualisation also helps to understand the result of the business and marketing strategies. Once this is done, the analyst can clear and prepare the data for analysis. Experts will decide the type of analytics based on its objective. Usually, a few models are tried before finalising one.
- Automate
Once the model is performing well, and revenues have started flowing, it is time to automate the system by integrating client data, customer analytics techniques, business processes and models with the business strategy. The benefit of automating is that it will alert the analyst if there is any change in the model accuracy. If there is a change in the accuracy, it needs to be conveyed to the stakeholders so that marketing teams can bring necessary adjustments in promotional spending and business strategy. Such alerts will help the companies present the right promotion to the customers.
To know the customer analytics process in detail, you can join the Advanced Executive Certificate Course In Product Management. More details about this program are available on our website.
Tips To Improve Customer Analytics Strategy
There is no doubt that customer analytics is helping many companies to improve their revenues and customer retention to a great extent. But in many cases, the insights that they get as the result of the analytics are not being used to their full potential. With these tips, you can make the best of the process.
- Create Customer Segments
We don’t talk to everyone in the same tone. Similarly, you cannot communicate with all customers in the same way. You need to change your communication tone depending on the customer. Every company’s customer base can be classified based on its locality, background, interests, expectations, etc. None of these groups wants the same thing from a brand. Customer analytics helps you classify customers according to their characteristics, behaviour and interests. This allows you to tailor your communication according to the customers and attract their attention.
- Enhance Personalised Experience
It has been found in studies that most customers will prefer to deal with a brand that offers them a personalised experience. Customer segmentation enables a company to provide personalised offers and experiences to its customers. Once the company has classified the customers, it is easy to communicate with them in a more personalised manner. All marketing campaigns can be customised in a way to meets the customers’ personal preferences and likes. By giving offers that enhance users’ experience with the brand, the organisation can get them to increase their spending.
- Choose The Most Effective Channels
Not all your customers interact with the brand through the same medium. Customer analytics helps you know the preferred channels of each customer segment. It will help you tailor your communication in each medium based on customer preferences. You don’t have to spread your advertising budget across all the channels. Companies can find out the most suitable medium for each customer segment for advertisement. It will save money and reduce disappointing results. Organisations can also avoid annoying customers by showing them ads that don’t add value.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions
Marketing is an expensive activity for all companies. They spend a significant amount of their budget on this activity, and any failures can set back the organisation to a great extent. If the companies can know which campaigns work well with different customer segments, it will help them make better marketing strategies. If a marketing campaign is not working well, customer analytics can reveal the elements of the campaign that the customers don’t favour. It can help the company optimise the campaigns and spend money where it will get the best returns.
- React To Changes Quickly
You cannot control the changes that happen in the market. External changes can affect the way customers behave. Though you cannot do anything about external factors, knowing customer behaviour will help you decide how to change your approach. Performing customer analytics enables companies to react quickly to changes in customer behaviour. They can change their marketing campaigns to ensure that the buyer remains interested in the product despite the changing market scenario. The ability to react quickly to such market events makes a company successful, even when others are struggling.
Types Of Customer Analytics That Benefit Companies
Customer Journey Analytics
It is an analysis of the interaction customers have with the brand from the time they research the product till they buy it and beyond that. The data collected for this customer analytics can come from different points as the customer interacts with the brand in different media. The initial research data could come from the website and social media platforms. When there is cart abandonment, this information comes from the company’s online portal or app.
Customer Experience Analytics
Analysing the experience customers have with a company can throw light on what they feel about the brand. This analysis considers two important aspects: customer onboarding and customer support. Companies should evaluate the time taken to convert the customer and also for the resolution of issues. Some platforms help you understand customers’ feelings towards the brand after each event. Customer analytics can also be conducted by getting information using e-mail surveys.
Customer Engagement Analytics
There are two types of customer engagement. One is their engagement with brands and the other with individual products. Understanding how customers interact with content and call-to-actions on the website can give excellent insights into what communication will interest them. Other metrics like click-rate and social media engagement can give valuable insights into improving customer engagement. It is quite natural for the two types of engagements to overlap as this process continues throughout the customer journey.
Customer Retention Analytics
It is not enough that your customers buy your product once. They must continue to be your customers and be loyal to the brand. This customer analytics type measures the loyalty of buyers to a brand and how many repeat purchases they make. It can be used to know how many clients leave the brand for competitors. Companies can find the percentage of their customers who prefer them to others. Customer retention and churn can throw light on major problems in the brand.
Customer Lifetime Analytics
Though this overlaps with customer journey and experience analytics, an important metric in this customer analytics is customer lifetime value. It is an indication of the revenue you can expect to get from customers throughout their journey with the brand. Individual businesses have their methods to calculate this value depending on their business. There are various important decisions that companies can make from this value. Those companies who have yet to work out a method can bring in a consultant to do this.
Voice Of Customer Analytics
It is very important to know what customers say about a brand. Their opinions, expectations and preferences should be analysed to know what they think about the product and company. This can come from various sources like surveys and social media interactions. The company must use the right questions to get real opinions from customers. Choosing the right medium and categorising based on demographics can give this customer analytics type a better result.
You can understand more about the importance of customer analytics at the Advanced Executive Certificate Course In Product Management conducted by famous institutions. A visit to our website will throw more light on the course details.
Conclusion
There is no denying the fact that without giving customers an outstanding experience, no brand can hope to survive in today’s competitive market. Analysing their activities and how they behave in the market is crucial to understanding what will excite them. Companies must make informed and smart decisions on how they spend their efforts and money on marketing campaigns. Customer analytics is an activity that can help brands make good decisions on how to attract customers and bring in more revenue.
