Consumer Analytics
What is Customer Analytics?
Customer data analytics is also known as customer analytics. It involves the analysis of customer behavior and information to determine, retain and attract the company’s most profitable clients.
Customer analytics is important
In the digital age, customers have access to a wealth of information about what they can buy, where to get it and at what price. Organizations must work hard to provide the best products and campaigns for the audience. To help organizations understand their clients, they can use tools for customer analytics.
Customer analytics aims to provide an accurate, single view of a company’s customers, allowing it to make informed decisions on how best to acquire and retain new clients. The system can identify customers with high value and recommend proactive interactions.
The journey can be optimized by organizations that understand the buying patterns and lifestyles of their customers. For accurate analysis, you need a lot of data. Analysis insights can be wrong or unhelpful without this.
Customer analytics: How it works
The management of customer analytics is usually done by a multidisciplinary group that includes leaders from marketing, sales and IT, as well as business analysts. The group needs to agree upon which metrics will provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience.
The customer analytics process begins with raw information, and concludes with intelligent decisions. Data must go through three steps before it can be used to inform business decisions: Collection, Organization and Analysis.
Collection. First, the organization must collect raw data about customers from different sources such as CRM systems, marketing tools or other third-party sources. These data can include:
- Demographics.
- History of purchases
- Social media and web activity.
- Interactions with contact centers
- Advertisement engagements.
- Responses to the survey
Organisation. The next step is to format customer data so that it can be used in customer analytics tools. Unorganized data could lead to inaccurate profiles. Inaccurate results can be caused by multiple CRMs, dissimilar enterprise resources planning software or poor data integration. Customer Data Platform can be used to store, organize and manage data.
Analyse. Customer analytics tools can help organizations understand their data, and display trends as charts and graphs. The tool, for example, can combine data from social media, demographics and purchase histories. The tool will then produce a graph that shows that the most valuable segment of customers for the company is New England women who earn a middle income and follow the company on Instagram.
The results of the tool can be used to inform business decisions. In the example above, an organization could decide to either increase their Instagram marketing budget OR make personalized offers for women living in New England.
Customer analytics best practices
Use the Customer Experience Metrics and best practices to help your organization create successful interactions with customers.
- Analyze how you can distribute your product and service to customers using all possible channels.
- Understand and assess the customer’s relationship with a brand, and whether they are satisfied. You can achieve this by combining quantitative and qualitative survey methods.
- Engagement with the customer at the appropriate time and through the correct channel.
- Predict the churn rates, and take action to increase a customer’s lifetime value.
- Analyze online behaviors and trends to spot trends.
- Assess which customers are likely to buy a particular product and segment the market accordingly.
Analytics tools for customers
Apps that help you understand your customers, improve their experience and tailor campaigns for specific segments are called customer analytics tools.
The customer data analytics tools are available as part of CRM software or standalone platforms. They can do anything from data integration (collecting customer data across different systems) to data visualization. They can also be connected to popular marketing and sales applications, content management systems email platforms, and loyalty programs.
There are many tools available to help organizations analyze their customers. Some of the tools available from leading vendors are:
- Adobe Analytics.
- Amplitude.
- Heap.
- Google Analytics 360.
- Mixpanel.
Adobe Analytics is a highly customizable tool that requires experienced professionals to use. Heap, on the other hand, may suit average users better. Adobe Analytics, Amplitude, and Google Analytics 360 are typically used by large organizations, while Heap, Mixpanel, and Google Analytics 360 tend to be more suitable for small and mid-sized businesses.
Cookie analytics: the future is here
Cookies are text files that contain identifying data. They can be sent to a browser by websites when people surf the web. Websites can collect data about the user session to personalize their website. is not the same.
Cookies sent by a website are called first-party cookies. They improve the user experience of the site. They can be used to remember items that customers have placed in their cart. Third party cookies are controversial because they come from other websites than the website a user visits. Advertisers use third-party cookies to target users with customized ads based on the user’s activity.
Data is used to create marketing insights through customer analytics. Third-party cookies are a significant source of this data, dating back to the 1990s. Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Google have all blocked third-party cookie since 2013, citing privacy concerns. Google, however, plans to remove these cookies in its Chrome browser by 2024.
The elimination of third-party cookies leaves organizations with less data about their customers to use in analytics and is forcing them to find other methods to run effective campaigns. Google started testing Federated Learning of Cohorts in March 2021 as a replacement for third-party cookie. The project was abandoned in July 2021 after privacy issues were raised. Google began testing Topics in 2022 as an alternative to FLoC.
Organisations should not wait for Google’s third-party cookies to be reinvented and instead take proactive measures:
- Take advantage of the first-party information. First-party cookie usage is not going to disappear, unlike third-party cookies. Organisations should use analytics and CDPs to turn the information they gather from sources into valuable marketing insights.
- Use creative ways to collect zero-party information. Organisations can make use of online polls, loyalty cards, and social media surveys in order to gather voluntary data from customers.
- Collaborate with online publishers. A large number of publishers collect first-party information through an opt-in model. This data can be used to provide marketing and prospecting insights for clients.
- Contextual marketing is a form of targeted marketing that does not require cookies from third parties.
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