Customer data is tricky. Analyzing and using this data effectively requires preparation and expertise. If you hope to turn your customer analytics overhead into a worthwhile investment, you’ll need to cultivate a set of best practices for managing your data.
Fortunately, data analytics offers plenty of ways for you to grow your eCommerce business. From tracking the customer journey to revealing lucrative insights, data is out there for the taking. All you need is the right approach.
Here are five tips for maximizing the potential of your customer analytics. Follow them for a higher ROI.
Understand the Customer Journey
Leveraging your customer analytics for success in digital marketing depends on your understanding of the customer journey. Without clear methods for finding and engaging your audience, your efforts will suffer.
Enhancing your approach to analytics starts with mapping that journey. This means applying all various metrics you can track onto each stage of customer engagement, building connections, and evaluating potential paths of success.
These are the customer journey stages to remember:
- Awareness — the customer finds your company
- Consideration — the customer evaluates your products and services against others
- Purchase — the customer goes makes a purchase
- Retention — the customer considers a secondary purchase
Align Company Goals with Metrics
You won’t get too far with your analytics if you fail to set clear goals for your business. The best way to go about this is to examine your performance metrics and identify where you might realistically get with the right campaign.
For example, if you want a better click-through rate, you’ll need to appeal to more customers at the awareness stage. To achieve this, you might explore building better customer data profiles that inform their interests. Alternatively, you might conduct A/B testing on new ad content.
Building a successful customer experience requires knowing your audience well. Ensure your business strives for this by following relevant data.
Automate Where You Can
The best thing we can do to cut down on marketing costs is to automate wherever possible. Restructuring your workflow with the right automation software makes it possible to eliminate tedious tasks while promoting greater levels of accuracy. In a digital marketing campaign, this can all but guarantee a win.
Consider the automated personalization on a platform like Amazon. Its algorithm uses customer data to draft a list of product recommendations and the customer sees only content that is relevant to them. The result is a boost in sales revenue.
With automation in customer analytics, you can experience results like this.
Focus on Relationships
Next, your use of customer analytics should focus on relationships. After all, your work ultimately involves people—your customers and clients—and recognizing the human element can help you build an effective understanding of customers through their data.
Assess your insights and draw narrative conclusions based on what audiences and team members want and need. These narratives can help you communicate with your team, whether you’re managing IT solutions or building a perfect marketing campaign.
Stories help us build empathy that can then translate into connections. Use these stories to connect with your target audience.
Build an Expert Team
Last but certainly not least, you’ll need to structure an expert team that knows how to harness data, apply it, and keep it secure. This might mean hiring a business analyst to help navigate data, software, and communication. These experts can bring invaluable organization and customer insights into a project, making for a worthwhile investment.
Alternatively, you might train one or more members of your team in the analysis of your customer data. No matter how you go about it, you’ll need to ensure that each member of your team is trained in cybersecurity best practices. Without these, you run the risk of a costly data breach.
To get the most bang for your buck, follow these tips for integrating customer analytics effectively. Data can offer you the means to appeal to more customers and automate elements of marketing. Done properly, this means a bigger ROI.
Start now by exploring the potential of customer analytics as well as data management platforms available to you. A lucrative future awaits.
