Tips for Analyzing Customer Data to Improve Marketing

Just about any marketing expert will tell you that you need customer data in order to make your marketing hit the right notes with your customers. When you gather the right customer data, you have the ability to find out what customers want from your organization and create personalized marketing tools to meet client expectations.

Analyzing the data you’ve collected is your next step. Your goal is to draw conclusions that lead to action. So, where do you start? Here are some tips to start your ideas flowing.

Analyze the Trends

Typically, you’ll find trends in any set of data, so be on the lookout to find those trends that will lead you to a particular action. Here are some examples:

Trend: A larger than normal number of customers are visiting you online or in person on Wednesdays.

• Look for things you are doing that may be causing this trend. Are you publishing a particular ad on Tuesdays? Are you publishing a newsletter on Tuesdays?
• Find the trigger and decide if you can take action to repeat it more often.
• Determine which customers are responding to that Tuesday action, and you’ll be able to target your marketing to other customers with similar profiles.

Trend: The number of customer complaints are higher than usual.

• Determine what these issues have in common. Are they all in one salesperson’s territory? Perhaps you need to do some coaching. Are they all concerning the same product? You may need to do additional research that will lead you to a global product issue.

Discover the Source of Sales

Match your marketing efforts to sales, not just action. You may publish an ad that increased the traffic to a specific landing page, but didn’t create many sales. You may publish a newsletter that got people clicking through to a landing page and making a purchase.

You can analyze this information to discover who you’re sending the newsletter to, and find more prospects who share a similar profile. You might also find that you need to revise your ad, publish it to different locations, change your landing page, or stop the ad campaign altogether.

Identify Your Top Customers

You may have customer personas that you have developed to tailor your marketing efforts. You can confirm that you have the right personas by identifying your top 10 or 20 customers and determining how to identify more of the same type of people.

When you identify your top current customers, consider things like sales volume, sales frequency and lifetime value, but also look at the cost to acquire and retain the customer. You want to identify highly profitable customers; don’t choose based only on revenue generated.

Once you have your top customer list, look for the things they have in common that you can target with your marketing efforts. Ask yourself these types of questions:

• Do your top customers fit into your perception of your top customers?
• Have you identified personas or customer profiles that match your top customers?
• Can you separate your top customers into separate segments or personas, or are they all in one category?

You may be surprised at some of your answers. You may be missing a potential customer goldmine, and this type of analysis will let you identify and correct that problem!

Final Thoughts

These are only a few of the ways in which analyzing customer data can help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns and grow your business. To stand out and succeed in today’s marketplace, you need to be better than your competition at identifying and catering to profitable target markets. It all starts with incident tracking to gather customer data for analysis.

For more information, download our latest eBook: Customer Engagement: Turning Customer Touchpoints into Insights that Drive Loyalty.

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