What type of data are we talking about?
To understand the type of data used by companies and therefore gathered, is important to know what customer data is: It’s defined as “the behavioural, demographic and personal information about customers collected by businesses and marketing companies to understand, communicate and engage with customers”
The type of data we’re talking about can include: personal data, engagement data, behavioural data and attitudinal data.
- Personal data: Within this category, we find two subcategories: PII (Personally IdentifiableInformation) such as full name, e-mail address, gender, age group… and Non-PII(Non-Personally Identifiable Information), as it could be IP address, cookies, device IDs…
- Engagement data: It tells you how customers interact with your brand. We find different channels to assemble engagement data: post likes, open rate, impressions, website visits, most viewed pages…
- Behavioural data: It determines patterns that customers reveal during the buying process. It can be subscription and purchase details, repeated actions, user attention, heat maps…
- Attitudinal data: Guided by the emotion, it’s how people perceive your product. It includes customer satisfaction, preferences, purchase criteria…
Here are five ways in which data collection can improve your digital strategy and your customers’ experience – and thus, delivering better outcomes for everyone.
1. Data improves your consumer’s database
2. Data helps you save time and money in your marketing strategy
3. Data allows ads’ personalisation
4. Data provides a better understanding of your targeted audience
5. Data improves communication and satisfaction of your customers
1. Data collection improves customers’ experience
How incredible is it when you land on the perfect website, that suits all your needs, it’s visually attractive to you and has got the exact product you’ve been after for weeks?
I know. You know. They know.
For many companies, collecting data is the main way of analysing and better understanding their customers’ needs. By analysing demographics such as gender, age, interests, behaviours… of their customers, companies can build a “buyer persona” – a prototype of their customer and identify customers’ goals and how they can help them.
After gathering all this information, companies can modify their digital presence, goods or services they offer to better suit their market demands.
One of the most feared situations by companies is customer dissatisfaction – who will buy in a shop that has a terrible customer service? Because of customers’ empowerment, it’s becoming incredibly dangerous.
Here’s when marketing does its thing and capture the tastes and standards of every segment, circulate that knowledge within the company and tailor the customer experience.
2. Data helps you save time and money in your marketing strategy
Have you ever heard “One message fits all”? Well, I’ll tell you what. It doesn’t work in digital marketing.
There are some basics steps in the customer relationship process that will allow you to plan and actively work towards abetter marketing strategy.
1.You need to identify your customers – create a buyer persona that includes demographics, habits, interests…
2.Segment them – find the most profitable ones and start your strategy.
3.Interact with them – make this interaction cost effective through automation if possible.
4. Customise your offerings to fit each customer’s needs.
It’ll allow you to create more cost effective and time efficient campaigns – and it’ll return a better response since you’re targeting people that actually might be interested in your product/service.
3. Data assists you in right-pricing
In this case, data requires zooming in and following four steps to get the right pricing, according to a McKinsey& Company studio:
1. Listen to the data: Determine the factors that drive prices for each product and segment.
2. Automate:It’s too expensive and time inefficient to analyse thousands of products manually. Automation can identify narrow segments, determine what drives value for each one and help companies to set prices for these products.
3. Build skills and confidence: Implementing new prices can be perceived as a challenge when there’s no information nor confidence about how to do it. Back-up your decision and let your customers know why.
4. Actively manage performance: We all have heard about market determining the prices.Yes, it is true somehow. But take the leading step and be empowered to adjust prices yourself rather than relying on a centralised team.
To sum up, customer data allows you to drive pricing analytics, a crucial step to overcome the challenges of price optimisation.
What’s more, pricing analytics will help you identify the most profitable channels and conceptualise customised promotions.
4. Data provides a better understanding of your targeted audience
There are some characteristics of your customers you might want to consider. Try tofill information like:
- Demographics:age, gender, socio-economic status
- Occupation
- Education
- Domain knowledge (user’s understanding of the product or service)
- Interests
- Learningstyle
After gathering your customers’ characteristics, try to organise the characteristics into groups. They should be significantly different from each other in order to justify them as different user types.
This will help you to develop buyer personas and scenarios. As you keep collecting data, you can add the information into your personas to make them more robust and realistic.
This will provide you with information about the kinds of content, features and characteristics users want and need in a product or service. As a result, you can compel a prioritised list of users’ wants and needs. It can be used to validate current plans as well as to learn new features that customers might find valuable.
Once you’ve identified audience’s goals pain-point sand, you can easily segment strategies and shorten your sales cycle.
5. Data improves communication and satisfaction of your customers
Data brings the opportunity of discovering values, since it shows the behaviour of customers’ trend and it leads to more precise analysis. This will allow you to meet expectations, understand customers’ needs and deliver value.
With these analytics in hand, you will be able to make sure your audience is seeing ads, social media posts, contests… and will create engagement with your brand, as well as an emotional connection. It will allow you to create customised strategies that will improve customer services and this will increase loyalty, revenue, brand recognition and business opportunity.
Ultimately, analysing your marketing database will help you identify your most loyal and profitable customers. You can implement this strategy in your marketing, for example offering loyalty programs or sending out special promotions to reward their behaviour and build deeper relationships.
