Your business gathers data every day, but do you know what to do with it? There’s a goldmine of information sitting in your customer records system—and it could make 2019 your most profitable year to date.
All you need to do is know how to analyze, interpret, and act on your data. This two-part blog series is a great place to start.
The Importance of Data for Business: Why It Really Matters
Changing buyer expectations over the past few years have shown a trend towards conversions based upon personalized experiences. In fact, 53% of customers will return to a brand that offers recommended items following a purchase.
As more people turn to online shopping for both their personal and business needs, it’s important to find ways to stand out in the online marketplace.
Ten years ago, companies were just catching onto the fact that social media was changing marketing forever. Customers were no longer a passive audience: Businesses could now engage with them in a two-way interaction on social media platforms—and measure the results.
Advertisements now had to be engaging and interesting, aimed at solving the customer’s problems, instead of traditional broadcast messaging about what a great product you have.
Customers now expect engagement (not broadcasting) as standard, so it’s time to step up your game further—and data is your secret weapon.
How Data Segmentation Will Revolutionize Your Marketing Strategy
Gone are the days of emailing your entire customer base with every offer you have. In fact, data legislation laws are being updated worldwide, giving you even more reason not to.
Data segmentation is the absolute minimum marketing strategy for any company seeking to grow in 2019.
It’s all about customer behaviors, demographics, and “nudge“ marketing. The more detail you know about your customers, the more precise your marketing can be. This, in turn, results in higher sales and added brand loyalty.
Segmenting data can be a huge task, but it’s easy to start.
Create buyer groups based on behaviors. Make sure you know the geographic location of every customer—even if your product is digital. Get into the mind of your buyer—and not your sales team.
Your data segmentation should go hand in hand with data analytics. One will inform the other, as each process becomes more refined. For example, your analytics will show the most popular pages on your website for a particular demographic so you can push those products to the most relevant customer segment.
It’s All About the Experience
Data analysis and segmentation is all about improving the customer experience.
Very few businesses have a truly unique offering, as prices and services become increasingly competitive. The customer experience, however, is how you can stand out from the crowd.
If customers become frustrated with your website, you’re losing sales. If they get annoyed with the number of irrelevant e-mails they receive from you, you’re losing loyalty. If they can’t contact you the way they want to—social media, email, phone, or web chat—you’re losing your reputation.
Investing in data analytics is all about improving your customer experience. The trends you’ll notice in your data will help you to streamline the user experience on your website or improve your call handler script.
The happier the customer is, the more loyalty you’ll gain. And loyal customers are repeat customers.
Next up: We’ll share five key steps to creating a data marketing strategy that can turn first-time customers into repeat ones.
