Who Is Your Customer?
Data. It’s what we live and die by in the marketing and business world. It’s how we know what our customers want and who they are. But what about what they do? What about their behavior? From search to purchase, what causes them to make certain decisions and end up buying or not buying?
This is where behavioral data comes into play. Customer analytics is the process by which data from customer behavior is used to guide key business decisions via market segmentation and predictive analytics. It provides information above and beyond what static data can provide, by encompassing information produced as a result of someone’s digital actions.
According to Jayson DeMers, founder and CEO of Audience Bloom and Forbes contributor, “everything is moving toward data: big data, mobile data, performance data, campaign data, product data, and even data about how we track our data.”
Future Forward
Being a customer-centric brand requires the anticipation of future needs — looking at behavioral patterns, market trends and user experiences for proactive measures to secure a personalized, unique and memorable experience across multiple channels. This enables the customer to feel understood and valued, and more likely to develop a loyalty that will be a good basis for customer retention, up-selling and cross-selling.
In order to get personal about the customer experience, you need to be specific, relevant and quantitative. No one can relate to things that they don’t understand, so understanding your customers’ wants and needs means being able to describe them with data around how they behave, as well as who they are.
Customer Journey
One way to track behavior is through monitoring and analyzing the customer journey. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is built with this in mind, following an action from the first click and attaching a Customer DNA to that person to then follow all their other actions.
Customer DNA allows you to build profiles of your customers based on their historical and real-time behavior. Together with pre-defined metrics that are centrally managed in the Customer DNA and continuously updated, this behavioral data allows you to anticipate customers’ needs and deliver what they want, when they want it and how they want it, providing the basis for a greater customer experience.
Source: Alteryx and AbsolutData
The machine learning and customer behavior analytics of a CDP encompasses the algorithms, optimization and learning tools that interact with the behavioral data in the Customer DNA. This eliminates manual interaction/intervention between the data being generated and offers the intelligence to orchestrate the most relevant, timely and contextually-aware interactions with each and every customer. The CDP can:
- Suggest actions most likely to result in desired outcomes
- Reveal what will happen if you decide on a particular course of action
- Tell you what will happen if you do nothing – unless all extraneous variables are identical to a historical scenario
Better Understanding Leads to Better Growth
It’s much more profitable to know what customers are likely to do in the future than to simply know what they have done in the past. McKinsey found that companies that make use of customer data analysis and use the analytics as part of decision-making processes led to more effective customer lifecycle decision-making and higher financial performance. Of those companies use customer behavior analytics:
- 50% are likely to have sales significantly above their competitors
- They are 6.5 times more likely to retain customers
- They are 7.4 times more likely to outperform competitors in making sales to existing customers
Overall, organizations that correctly utilize customer behavior analytics are 19 times more likely to achieve above average profitability.
Successful organizations need to understand their customers through a plethora of attributes, including behavior, context, interests and preferences, to properly “wow” them and turn them into loyal customers. To achieve this, reaching customers via the right channel, with the right content, at the right time is paramount in improving customer experiences, enhancing brand loyalty and increasing customer value.
