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Customer Analytics: Types, Tools, and Benefits

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Discover how customer analytics can benefit your business and how to start collecting and analyzing customer data.

[Featured Image] Two marketing professionals meet to discuss their company's customer analytics.

Data now delivers crucial insights across business functions, including when it comes to customers. Whether you want to understand how to improve customer engagement or provide more meaningful customer service, customer analytics is the process of using customer data to extract valuable insights and improve success.

In this article, we'll discuss more about customer analytics, including the types of analytics to use depending on what you're trying to discover, and important tools that can help. Afterward, if you're interested in developing your customer analytics skills, consider enrolling in the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate, where you'll learn how to collect and organize data to draw conclusions, make predictions, and drive informed decision-making.

What is customer analytics?

Customer analytics is the process of using customer data鈥攕uch as purchase history, geographic location, or demographics鈥攖o generate important insights, which can then be used to improve marketing strategies and sales strategies.听

Customer analytics encompasses techniques like customer segmentation, social listening, customer journey mapping, A/B testing, predictive modeling, and data visualization. 聽

Which professionals use customer analytics?

Depending on the size of an organization, customer analytics could be an integral part of the following roles:

4 types of customer analytics聽

Customer analytics covers a good bit of ground, so it鈥檚 useful to consider the different approaches you can take to handling customer data. 聽

1. Descriptive customer analytics聽

Descriptive customer analytics involves gathering historical data to understand how customers have interacted with your brand in the past. Data might include purchasing patterns, website or social engagement, email opens and clicks, and interactions with customer service. These data give you clues about what customers did but not why they did it.听

2. Diagnostic customer analytics聽

Diagnostic customer analytics 聽goes beyond the 鈥渨hat鈥 of customer analytics to find out the 鈥渨hy.鈥 What are the reasons behind what customers do? What is the connection between different factors or events that influence their actions?聽

3. Predictive customer analytics聽

Predictive customer analytics involves using historical data and machine learning techniques to forecast what customers will do in the future based on what they鈥檝e done in the past. How likely are they to make a purchase? How might they respond to marketing campaigns? What can you do to prevent customer churn? When you can anticipate customers鈥 needs accurately, you can allocate resources more effectively.听

4. Prescriptive customer analytics聽

Prescriptive customer analytics focuses on recommending particular actions that will lead to the marketing or sales results you want, such as more clicks, more purchases, or more engagement. By looking at multiple possible scenarios, prescriptive analytics determines what you should do next, from adjusting your pricing strategy to optimizing marketing messaging.听聽

7 reasons why customer analytics is important

As consumers become more savvy and look for trustworthy brands, customer analytics is vital to your company's success because it enables you to understand your customers, reach them, and meet their needs. Let鈥檚 take a look at some additional benefits of customer segmentation. 聽

1. Improve customer segmentation.

With more detailed and accurate customer data, you can batch members of your customer base according to their shared characteristics.听

2. Tailor marketing campaigns to different customer segments.

Understanding customers鈥 preferences, pain points, goals, and where they are in the buyer鈥檚 journey can help you deliver the right message at the right time. For example, contacts in the consideration stage may need more information before making a purchase, while your loyal customers may be interested in new product recommendations based on their interests.听

3. Improve customer experience.

Along with tailoring your marketing messaging, customer analytics can help you offer experiences at every customer touchpoint鈥攊ncluding your website, social media, email, mobile apps, and physical locations鈥攖hat resonate deeply with customers. In addition, customer analytics helps you identify touchpoints where customers might disengage so you can optimize the customer journey.听聽

4. Improve customer engagement.听

Personalized communications and improved customer experiences may inspire customers to participate in your brand鈥檚 interactive experiences, such as live events, quizzes, contests, polls, and user-generated content. More engagement can foster a sense of community among customers and make your brand memorable.听

5. Reducing campaign costs.

Customer analytics eliminates a lot of guesswork, so more effective campaigns can mean spending less on paid advertising while still generating leads and meeting marketing goals.听

6. Boost sales.

With the insights you glean from customer analytics methods, you can personalize offers and product recommendations and cross-sell and upsell effectively.听

7. Retain customers.听

Over time, personalized communications and engaging experiences can help you build lasting relationships with customers. These customers may then become loyal and even promote your brand to others.听

Types of customer analytics software聽

There are a number of tools you can use to deliver key insights about your customers. Below, we break down the options by functionality and focus. 聽

Customer experience

Customer experience analytics tools help you manage your company鈥檚 interactions with customers throughout the entire buyer鈥檚 journey, including conversational marketing, support messaging, integrations with other tools, sales assistance, content creation, and personalization.听聽

  • for a complete customer experience solution聽

  • for personalizing content and timing its delivery

  • for unifying customer touchpoints across different social media platforms聽

  • for examining how customers engage with your site or products

Customer journey聽

Similar to customer experience tools, customer journey analytics tools help you market to customers across all channels and optimize the entire journey, from the first touchpoint through making a purchase and beyond.听

  • for automating cross-channel journeys and personalizing each customer鈥檚 journey聽

  • for reducing digital friction and gaining visibility into all areas of the customer journey聽聽聽

  • for managing cross-channel campaigns and optimizing the entire journey聽聽聽

  • for planning, testing, and executing cross-channel customer journeys

Customer behavior

Customer behavior analytics tools help you examine the actions that customers take on your website or mobile app so that you can improve the UX design and boost conversions.听

  • and for analyzing heatmaps and recordings of customer activity on your site聽聽

  • for gathering customer feedback on products and experiences聽

  • for A/B testing different versions of web pages to find out which one performs the best

Customer engagement

Customer engagement analytics tools help you communicate with customers and analyze interactions. Tools span live chat, in-app messaging, email marketing, survey apps, and chatbots.

  • for optimizing communications, understanding context, and analyzing performance聽

  • for streamlining and personalizing communications at scale, with customer history built in for better context

  • for empowering the entire revenue team, boost engagement with customers, see what鈥檚 working, and close more deals聽

Customer service聽

Good customer service makes all the difference, leading to higher customer loyalty and even word-of-mouth which keep your customer acquisition costs low. Customer service analytics tools gather insights from support conversations with customers to help you improve interactions, products, and experiences.听聽

  • for delivering personalized service, anticipating customer needs, and minimizing support volume聽聽

  • for setting up AI chatbots, handling support tickets, extracting insights from data, and enabling team collaboration

  • for gathering feedback from enterprise clients at scale, improving support, and getting more upsells and referrals

Customer retention聽

Customer retention analytics tools help you figure out why customers stay or leave your business, so that you can improve your ability to keep customers over time.

  • for improving your subscription service to reduce cancellations and keep more customers subscribing聽聽

  • for enabling e-commerce retention marketing and motivating customers with loyalty programs聽

  • for onboarding customers to a digital product with personalized guidance and using data-driven insights to reduce support cost and churn rate聽

Note that some of these customer analytics software tools may fall under more than one of the above categories, depending on their features and capabilities.听

How to collect and analyze customer data聽

Here are some steps to follow to collect and analyze customer data and drive business success.听聽

1. Determine your data and business goals.

What specific insights are you looking for from customer data? How will you use this information to make business decisions? For example, if your goal is to retain more customers, you would collect information that gives you clues as to why customers are dropping off. What factors lead to their dissatisfaction? This information could make it easier to improve customer experiences and develop a retention strategy.听

2. Select customer analytics software.

Using the right customer analytics software for your business and goals can speed up processes, provide more insights, and facilitate team collaboration. Using the section above as a starting point, investigate different software programs to find the one that best fits your needs. Consider price, features, ease of use, and the kinds of data each software program measures.听聽

3. Identify data sources.听

Data sources might include website traffic, social media engagement analytics, customer surveys, purchase details, and customer service desk interactions. Once you ensure data privacy compliance, set up your customer analytics software to begin tracking customer data.听

4. Clean data.听

It鈥檚 important to clean data in customer analytics, so that you can gain reliable insights for making business decisions. You can clean data by removing duplicate customer records, correcting errors, standardizing data formats, and improving the categorization.听

5. Identify patterns.

With the help of your software, begin identifying patterns in data such as common customer concerns, cart abandonment trends, email open and click rates among customer segments, and product usage details.

6. Identify learnings and apply them.

Once you鈥檝e found patterns in the data, analyze it to identify your key takeaways. For example, let鈥檚 say you discover that most customers whose engagement declines over a defined period of time will churn. Based on this learning, you could create a more robust retention strategy to re-engage customers with personalized communication, targeted product offers, and loyalty programs to lower your churn rates.听

Build your customer analytics skills with 糖心vlog官网观看

Build and strengthen your customer analytics and data analytics skills on 糖心vlog官网观看.

  • Get comfortable with the subject: For an overview of customer analytics, consider the University of Pennsylvania鈥檚 Customer Analytics course, part of the larger Business Analytics specialization.听You'll learn about descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, and their application to real-world business practices.

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