Business analytics have come a long way in the last decade. Now that there are easy-to-use software solutions that don’t require a huge investment, businesses of all sizes can use analytics to reach a variety of goals.
Analytics might have a questionable reputation among the general public, but it’s important to remember that they can be used ethically to help create a personalized customer experience. In addition to the role of analytics in operations and customer service, data tools can be used to help customers have an optimal experience when interacting with your business. Here’s how.
Customer Segmentation with Analytics
As a company, you aren’t serving everyone. You’re speaking to a certain “ideal customer.” However, you might have more than one ideal customer, depending on how many products or services you offer. Marketing professionals use buyer “personas” to help target their marketing messages.
Segmentation is extremely helpful for creating a more personalized experience. Essentially, it means separating customers based on certain criteria, like age, buying habits, and preferences. By creating separate lists of people, you can tailor your messaging, special offers, and other personalized marketing tactics that will improve the customer experience.
When you’re trying to provide more personalization for customers, segmentation is critical. You can’t create personalized content if you’re sending everything to the same list or running the same ad for all your past and future customers.
Reducing Customer “Churn”
With analytics, it’s not just about the customers who buy—but about the customers who don’t buy. By collecting and analyzing data, you can see when customers stop buying from you and allow you to be proactive in reducing customer “churn.” This is a type of predictive modeling that can help your business grow.
While you won’t be able to retain every customer who buys from you, using analytics will help you retain customers who would otherwise disappear after making a purchase. This also helps improve the customer experience, since you can give them a friendly tap on the shoulder and offer them some value before they decide to move on. That can make a huge difference in overall loyalty!
Personalized Marketing Opportunities
The customer experience begins even before someone buys something from your company. Their first contact with you is going to be some kind of marketing message, whether through an ad, a giveaway, a search, or word-of-mouth recommendations. You can start personalization right away with advertising if you’re using analytics.
By creating several different marketing campaigns that can appeal to different types of customers and targeting those campaigns, you can start the customer personalization process for new customers. Then, if they interact with your ads, you can use data for retargeting campaigns. If they end up becoming a customer, you’ll get even more data that you can use for even more personalization.
Combining Analytics with Automation
Customers want to reach their goals (buying a fantastic product, setting up a service, etc.) as quickly and easily as possible, especially those who have grown up with digital technology at their fingertips. They don’t want to have to make calls, search a huge catalog of products, or put in more effort than they have to. They don’t want to have to remember when to reorder their favorite products or book a new appointment.
By using analytics in combination with automation, you can remove some of these friction points by anticipating your customers’ needs. Automation allows you to set up personalization systems based on certain criteria. This is critical for personalization at scale. You might be able to manually provide a completely personalized experience for 100 customers, but you won’t be able to scale that up and maintain the same level of service and customer experience.
The options for automation tools are expanding rapidly. These days, even the smallest businesses can use automation powered by artificial intelligence to help engage and serve customers a more personalized experience.
Personalization with Analytics Can Help Boost Loyalty
Business analytics represent a win-win for companies and customers alike. It gives companies the ability to learn more about their customers and tailor their offers to meet the needs of their market. This can help them grow their revenue, provide better customer service, and become more efficient.
For customers, analytics can help remove sources of frustration and friction that can occur during interactions with businesses. Personalization reduces irrelevant ads and offers, which can be very annoying in our loud and busy world. Overall, it improves the customer experience with no additional effort on the customer’s part.
Personalization for customers does take some setup, but it’s a worthwhile investment in today’s market. Knowing your customers helps you give them the best possible experience—and you’ll get to know your customers best through data analytics.
