Imagine for a moment that as a business owner you are able to know where the data you are getting for your business was coming from. Or able to determine what was responsible for that wonderful conversion rate that your business has been experiencing. Now the story doesn’t end here.
Okay what if you are also able to identify pages on your business website that was actually leading visitors away from your business, which you can now effect changes to and correct. Wouldn’t this be just great?
Customer analytics
Well, the truth is that this and more indeed is what customer analytics can achieve for your business. But what exactly is customer analytics? Yes, customer analytics is a process that involves using data regarding customer behavior in order to assist in making important business decisions. And, today this process is playing a critical role in helping to predict customer behavior.
But you see before the advent of the World Wide Web, it was not easy to know what was performing or working and what wasn’t as far as any business was concerned. And, this was because it was not possible to isolate variables. Then, it was not possible for instance to say with complete assurance that a particular activity such as a marketing campaign resulted in an increase of 40% in sales.
However, with the emergence of the internet things have changed, and it is now possible to isolate variables with a degree of precision. Since the internet allows one to collect a great amount of data that can be analyzed, segmented plus isolated in accordance with any possible variable that you want. And, so with data acquired for the purpose of customer analytics one will be able to achieve the following:
- Quickly compare accumulated data with that of historical data so that you can discover new trends and place your recent data in its right context.
- Know where the data you have come from. An example regarding this is a situation where your sales is not evenly spread among your customers with a small number of them spending most of the money you earned. Knowledge of this can make you decide to spend more in retaining this group of people.
- Make you know which marketing campaign you have undertaken that performed best. That is led to greater sales in the period under review.
- It will also make you know whether effecting small changes in a marketing campaign that is already successful will do better or worse. For example, changing just a single word or an image may result in better performance regarding a marketing campaign’s message.
Forecasting customer behavior
Being able to predict purchasing habits plus lifestyle preferences is just the way to go. Such information is made up of several aspects such as magazine subscriptions, surveys, credit card purchases, loyalty card membership, and so on. And, these categories can be used in creating profiles for a company’s most profitable clients. Now when many potential clients are accumulated in a particular area it shows that such area is a good place for a business to be situated. In addition, a drive-time analysis can be employed to ascertain how far a particular client will be driving to a given location. So with the combination of these information sources, it is possible for a monetary value to be placed on every household in a given trade area.
Lastly, as customer prediction methods improve going into the future this tool will most likely be something of a necessity rather than one of convenience. This is because with customer analytics, corporations can make business decisions with a great level of certainty since every decision will be based on objective data.
