6 Ways to Make Use of Insights to Understand Customers
Optimizing marketing campaigns to customer experiences is the most effective way to acquire new customers. But, along with acquiring new customers, it is also important to keep understanding existing customers to foster their needs and build customer loyalty. As per Teradata, around 41% of marketing professionals are reported to use customer engagement insights to optimize their marketing strategy to their customer experience data.
Why understanding customers is a MUST for all of us?
Simply stated, customers bring revenue and reputation for the brand. Buyers form the resource upon that is the main metric of the success of any business. Hence, the importance of understanding customers is that it helps –
- Repeat purchases and improves sales.
- Generates revenue and growth for a business.
- Build customer loyalty and satisfaction, they could lose their customers.
- Meet and sell to the needs of the customers.
- Achieve business goals by achieving a large customer base.
Moreover, it costs a greater amount to attract and acquire new customers than retaining existing ones. And the relationship between a brand and its customers is the cornerstone of building a customer base, both new and existing ones. Here we have explained six techniques to use the data more efficiently to understand your customers better.
1. Monitor real-time customers’ data
A brand needs to have a proactive approach to create a seamless customer experience across various digital marketing touch points and serving to the customers’ needs on all platforms where their targeted customers are actively looking for similar product details and sharing problems that products or services can solve.
All this can be done by using a CRM that gives organizations the real-time data on their customers. A customer relationship management or CRM tool provides exhaustive analytics of the customers’ demography and activities which is why email marketing campaigns are based on the CRM tool to reach the right customers and build campaigns on accurate and updated customer data in CRM tool.
Major CRM tools provide sturdy email marketing functionalities with the benefits of real-time tracking. Using a CRM tool, marketers can –
- Monitor the performance of their email campaigns
- Monitor all campaign results through various fields including Opened/Viewed, Total Sent/Attempted, Bounce/Invalid, Link clicked, Unsubscribed etc.
- Understand their target customers by collecting data on their likes and dislikes
- Source visual-rich, context-rich presentation of analytics data with Pie, Bar, Line charts etc., for better and quicker understanding.
With the advent of various CRM tools, marketers can use technologies to collect, extract, process, blend and analyze real-time customer data to identify customer preferences and purchase patterns and predict customer needs even before customers say so.
2. Pinpoint different segments of customers
Tag similar types of customers together and categorize in various segments to create optimized campaigns for diverse customer segments and achieve better fruitful results. It’s crucial to understand the different factors based on which marketers can categorize their customers, and these may include parameters such as, customers’ frequent purchases, products they purchase, their location, income level, their problem areas, for whom they buy the product, whether for themselves or someone else and many others.
As these segments will be formed and customers will be tagged with the right categories, it is easier to create personalized marketing and sales campaigns with the right messaging for the right people. These optimized campaigns will add more value to both the customers and business.
3. Focus on social media customer engagement
Studies and insights sighting customers’ activities and engagement on social media channels are aplenty – consumers are found to be engaging on social media channels for around 6 hours a day. Hence, the role of a social media channel in influencing consumers’ opinions is unavoidable. That’s why every brand needs to invest their resources on social media engagement by crafting strategies to engage their target consumers and prospects on social media channels where they are most active in seeking products, services or solutions that a company provides.
Unlike traditional platforms, social media channels are to be used for authentic and engagement-driven campaigns which involve useful and real information. Marketers can use social CRM tools for running their social media campaigns as these tools support executing various campaigns on all major social channels and also collect analytics data from all platforms.
These social CRM tools also integrate customers’ social media into the CRM to present live feed of social updates posted by customers which will be additional resources that give better understanding of what discussions they mostly engage with.
4. Use customer service data
This is one of the best sources to get details on your customers’ psyche. Marketers can create questionnaires and share with the customer service team to collect their opinions and replies.
Whenever customers contact the customer service team, representatives can ask them those questions about customers’ likes, hobbies, lifestyle preferences, type of problems they face, expectations from products, how they use products, feature upgrades and improvements they want from products or services and many others.
We recommend continuing these practices to aggregate regular data and accumulate details on valuable customer insights, customers that are willing to stay and make more purchases to create better targeted messages for future campaigns.
5. Zero in on customers’ special preferences
Fostering customers with useful information about products and services can be a good practice, but marketers should not be limiting to this practice. Marketers should also nurture to specific interests of customers as It gives the marks of how attentive a brand is towards its customers, thus, cementing customer relations and bring them closer to the brand.
Many organizations follow this practice of creating content and messages that resonate the most with special interests of their targeted customers. Marketers can share articles related to their customers’ problem areas and their preferences and also the latest trends in that product segment to spread the awareness and nurture customers with information they need about the product and what is happening in the industry.
The goal is to spark discussions around various other topics than continue sending content only related to products or services which takes a monotonous turn after a point. Thus, marketers can generate several opportunities to create engaging discussion thread with their prospects and customers.
6. Build in-depth contact details
Lastly, marketers need to ensure that they are maintaining one centralized customer database which contain accurate, updated and in-depth contact data. Many organizations invest in a cloud-based CRM tool that can keep all and in-depth customer data since building a rich customer persona profile is crucial for continuing successful customer engagement.
Do you find these tips on collecting and using data on understanding customers better and delivering them better customer experience? If you would like to share your one special tip or strategy that brings your customers closer and make them loyal, then please enlighten us in the comment section below.