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How To Leverage Customer Data For Better Marketing Campaigns
Customer data is important information that businesses use for their content and marketing campaigns. It allows businesses to create content that gets more views and curate posts that get more engagement.
Using customer data is like having a guide in navigating your business in this competitive industry. Without customer data, you’re blindly doing marketing and hoping something sticks.
But blind marketing and hoping isn’t an efficient way to run your marketing campaigns.
Leveraging customer data is the most optimal way to achieve your desired results and hit those marketing goals.
In this article, we will discuss how you can use customer data for better marketing campaigns. If you’re looking to improve your marketing performance, this just might do the trick.
What Is Customer Data?
In technical terms, customer data pertains to behavioral, demographic, and personal information about customers. It can be a client’s name, email address, gender, or phone number.
Customer data is important to any sales team with predictive dialers and other sales tools because it allows them to create scripts or marketing campaigns to keeps customers engaged or hooked.
This particular element of a business is so important that even growth hacking agencies start with customer data to form strategies for their clients.
A much more in-depth customer data could be average spending, frequency of store/website visit, most visited web page, abandoned items in cart, and most engaged social media platform.
In-depth customer data goes beyond these elements and additional factors will depend on businesses.
Ideally, customer data can be grouped into 4 categories:
I. Personal Data
Personal data includes full names, physical address, email address, date of birth, driver’s license number, body sizes, and many more. These are information that can be used to identify a customer.
Even IP addresses, device IDs, and cookies fall under this category as well.
This type of data is used by businesses to personalize their marketing campaigns.
II. Engagement Data
Engagement data tells you how your customers interact with your brand or content through different marketing avenues or through your website.
Examples of engagement data could be how your customers react to your new style of Instagram content vs a Facebook post. Another one could be how your customers engage with your long posts vs short posts.
But most of the data here displays the frequently visited web pages and most viewed products. Even checking web traffic and user flow are also part of this group.
Impressions on paid advertisements are also included in this category. Other metrics that are part of this group would be the number of likes, shares, retweets, replies, open rate, bounce rate, etc.
III. Behavioral Data
Behavioral data help marketers uncover underlying patterns that customers may have in their purchase journey.
The data here is gathered through purchase details, purchase history, reasons for cart abandonment, and customer loyalty program details.
On the more technical side, marketers gather behavioral data through heatmaps to see their customer’s buying journey on their website.
This allows business owners to improve every aspect of their online store to make it more efficient and seamless for their customers.
The heatmap also benefits ad designers so they can improve the placements of their advertisements.
IV. Attitudinal Data
Attitudinal data are the feelings and emotions felt by your customers. It’s how they perceive your brand and products. The data here is often subjective since thoughts and feelings tend to change from time to time.
But regardless of the data being subjective, it’s important to take into account these elements. What most marketers do is they partner attitudinal data with a concrete and objective data set.
This data is gathered through surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer feedback, and reviews.
Here are a few examples of attitudinal data:
- Customer sentiment
- Brand perception
- Customer satisfaction
- Customer experience
How To Leverage Customer Data For Marketing Campaigns
Gathering customer data is useless if you can’t use them to scale your business. Collecting information about your customers is done for the very reason of serving them better which ultimately affects your bottom line positively.
1. Personalization
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for centuries, you know that personalization is a hit marketing strategy that businesses use.
A few years ago, most businesses went for a one size fits all approach in their marketing efforts. It did work for a couple of years but the rise of algorithms that are so great at tailoring what people need has changed customer behavior.
Consumers now want marketing campaigns that speak to them. Whether they know it consciously or unconsciously, applying this type of strategy improves marketing metrics and KPIs.
Luckily, if you’ve gathered significant customer data from your market, then you can utilize personalization greatly.
Personalization goes beyond just a “Hi, (name)!”, high-level personalization marketing is using data to let your customers have a much more tailored experience.
When consumers are presented with the right product via the right message, the higher the chance of your business in converting prospects to paying customers.
According to a survey done by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
2. Efficient Customer Segmentation
Without customer segmentation, you’re only looking at customers as one group - no distinctions or variables that separate them. This is where most businesses fail because they think that all of their customers are the same.
Thinking that all people that buy your product are alike can never be farther from the truth. Even a small local grocery store can segment its customers. Whether you’re a Saas or an eCommerce store, you can also do customer segmentation and enjoy its benefits.
Customer segmentation helps businesses smooth out marketing processes and increase the business teams’ productivity.
But how does customer data help with customer segmentation? Well, customer segmentation can’t be done if data isn’t present. Therefore, gathering customer data is the very first thing in segmentation.
Once you’ve gathered your data, take a look at the different information you’ve collected. By analyzing this information, you’ll have a better picture of who your audience is.
You’ll now see the age of the majority of your customers, the dominating gender of your buyers, their spending habits, and their interests. If you’re already dividing your customers into those groups, you’re already doing customer segmentation.
After grouping or segmenting your customers, you can now properly tailor your marketing campaign and product presentation.
A good example is how Agent Advice didn’t settle in giving general knowledge on real estate, instead, it gave “advice” to specific states in the US. The website had guides on getting a real estate license in California, Florida, Georgia, and many more.
This segmentation strategy allowed the website to educate many interested readers coming from different states. It has widened their reach and influence.
3. Customer Retention
Other than acquiring more customers, leveraging customer data can also help with customer retention purposes. The data presented here allows businesses to increase customer retention and loyalty.
Since customer data displays what your customer wants and how they want to be approached, you can leverage that knowledge to keep them coming back for more. By knowing what to offer and how to serve them, you’re making your customers happy and more than satisfied with your business.
A boost in revenue is also possible with high customer retention rates. It’s much easier for a business to upsell or sell a new product to a repeat customer since that person has already many experiences with your business.
According to Bain and Co, a 5% increase in customer retention rate will yield more than a 25% increase in profit.
4. Customer Acquisition
If customer data can help with marketing campaigns pertaining to customer retention, then you can bet that it also helps with customer acquisition.
An extensive customer data set will allow you to get significant insights into what your customers will be interested in. This data set should also tell you what type of marketing offers do your customers engage the most.
By knowing these types of information, you’re not just putting anything out there and hoping something sticks. You now have a more strategic approach that’s backed by data.
Once you’ve understood this, that customer acquisition rate in your marketing campaigns will see a significant increase. Since you’ve gathered enough data to see what works well with your customers, the higher the chances of them engaging and responding to your campaigns.
5. Better Storytelling
Storytelling is a new way to improve the results of a marketing campaign. Storytelling marketing simply means using a narrative to communicate a message to your audience.
This is what a top SEO company would implement when a client wants to increase its digital presence. Among other strategies, storytelling is a proven method to hook your customers’ attention.
The narrative story here shouldn’t be just any story or scenario, it should be something that your customers can relate to.
A great strategy to use when combining storytelling and marketing would be structuring your narrative in a way that addresses the pain points of your customers.
And a way to identify these pain points would be by analyzing your customer data. You need to identify these pain points first before you can address them.
This strategy works for any business in any industry - it can work for real estate ads, clothing wear, Saas products, to even brick and mortar stores.
Your customer data should have this information in your system. If you haven’t started yet, you can gather this information through running surveys. Ask your customers what’s the biggest challenge they face in their buying journey?
The answers to this question are the pain points you’re looking for. You can leverage the answers to create a narrative that addresses their challenges in your marketing campaigns.
An example is how InFlow Inventory knew that what’s stopping people from trying out their product is the unfamiliarity of the software. To address this, they marketed a free 14-day trial without the need of inputting a credit card.
6. Promotions and Special Offers
A coupon statistic showed that 45% of people would shop more online if they could use more coupons. But does this mean that you should keep generating coupons or special offers?
You need to remember that for promotions and special offers to work, it must be something that your customers want. Sometimes, businesses think that when they release a promotion, their customers will immediately pick it up.
However, that’s not how consumer psychology works. For these offers to get attention, it must be something that can benefit your customers.
If you’re promoting a buy 1 take 1 offer for a brown leather shoe of yours because there are still a lot in stock, there’s a good chance that it still won’t be picked up. Why? You need to understand that there’s a reason why you have a lot of those shoes in stock. A primary reason is that your customer generally doesn’t like it. And offering a buy 1 take 1 of the same shoe won’t do the trick.
What you can do is partner it with another shoe that’s really selling - a shoe that is easy to sell. Not only are you enticing a buy 1 take 1 offer but you’re clearing out the brown leather shoe stocks you have left.
Remember, promotions and special offers only work if it is something that interests your customers.
Analyze your customer data to see what piques the interest of your customers. Understand what hooks their attention.
An example of this could be a high cart abandonment rate because of shipping costs. Even though people love or are sold on your product, because of the shipping costs, they abandon their cart instead.
If you’re in this situation, leverage that customer data and start a free shipping fee marketing campaign. This will make your customers buy more of your products since their major pain point has been addressed.
7. Improved Products or Services
Since customer feedback is under customer data, you can leverage that information to improve your customer service or products for a better marketing campaign.
You can usually see this in businesses that sell products to people. They’ll release a brand new product and after a couple of months, they’ll release a newer version of it and claim that it’s the much-improved version.
A great thing about reading or listening to customer feedback is you’re showing that your customers’ opinion matters. It shows that you’re not just in business to make money but you’re there to also listen to what they have to say.
By continuing to improve your products and services, it shows that you’re determined to really give what’s best to your customers. It’s a marketing campaign narrative that you can capitalize on.
An example is how Aura encourages its users to tell them a feature they would like to be added to the software so they can work on that upgrade in the near future.
8. Identify New Opportunities
Analyzing consumer data can also bring your business new opportunities. These opportunities can come in the form of untapped markets, a new distribution channel, or a new USP to be used as a marketing campaign.
An example could be how TransparentLabs used its blog page to spread valuable content to its customers. Rather than going the traditional route of just advertising a supplement or other products, the business leveraged their website as a new distribution channel to bring value to their customers on building muscle and losing fat.
Another example of how businesses used customer data to identify new opportunities would be in the lingerie industry. Companies noticed that the people who are looking for lingerie aren’t just the ones who are slim or fit. There are those who are in the plus-size range that want to wear great lingerie as well.
That’s why you now see plus-size categories for most lingerie stores. By simply looking at customer data and doing a bit of market research, the industry has identified a new opportunity.
9. Understanding the current environment of your industry
An underrated way of using customer data with regards to marketing campaigns is by checking up on how your customers are doing.
Customer data can show you a purchase graph of your customers. There you can see whether purchases are declining or increasing.
If it’s increasing, there’s no problem at all. Business is good and you just continue what you’re doing.
But if it’s declining, then that should get your attention. If you’ve been doing all the right types of marketing and research and you still see your purchases decline, it’s time to check on your customers.
Maybe a lot of your customers were affected by the economic blow of the COVID 19. If you’re in this scenario, it’s much better to be a human for others than continuing to focus on your revenue.
What you can do is give out a relief package, or start a special offer marketing campaign that benefits your customers. When times are hard, people will always remember who was there to help them.
And if your business was kind enough to help your customers in their times of need, you will gain a customer for a lifetime. These acts will produce customer loyalty and a great relationship.
Conclusion
Customer data helps businesses in a lot of ways. The information they’ve gathered helps them with their marketing initiatives, improves their products, and changes their service for the better.
By applying the strategies above, your marketing campaigns will see a better result. Once you check under the hood, you will see your marketing metrics and KPIs improve.
Author Bio
Burkhard Berger is the founder of Novum™. You can follow him on his journey from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors on novumhq.com. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.
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