Many businesses today are involved in so many different aspects of running their company that it can be easy to fall behind on some of the most crucial. For example, you’ll want to know how your customers like to receive information, how they wish to communicate with you, and the overall experience they’re having with your company. You simply cannot make data-driven decisions unless you’re also spending the time to analyze and receive that data to begin with.
Ask to learn more
Conducting interviews is one key way to fill in the gaps for your business. Quantitative data that you’ve captured from your customers in the form of a survey is great for determining where your brand needs improvement or to find which strategies work. However, no statistic from quantitative data can clearly explain why a certain campaign was more successful than another when compared with actually talking to the customer directly. Talking to customers and asking them directly about what prompted them to act will give more context to the metrics you already have.
Skipping over this step could lead you to invest time and money where it’s not most effective. When you know where you need to improve or capitalize on something that’s working, though, your money will be funneled as effectively as possible.
“The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.” – Max Levchin, PayPal co-founder.
Examine usage data
Personalization and segmentation are crucial for any company involved in web marketing. Big data collected in this manner helps companies understand the different types of their target market and identify the best type of content for that group, based on what other similar customers used as their motivation for conversion. What attracts a baby boomer to your product may be different from a young millennial. Consider who you are trying to attract and use usage metrics to identify what’s most appropriate.
“When customers are interacting with your business, be it a website or an app, they’re telling you what you’re doing right and wrong. Follow their cues and build a more consumer friendly process around their existing behavior.” – Alex Pina, Comfortup.
Don’t forget about stagnant customers
Sometimes the strategy you implemented in the past doesn’t yield the return on investment you expected or it doesn’t keep a customer coming back to engage with your brand again. When a person converts once or even twice, but then never returns, there’s an opportunity to capture that customer again by looking more deeply at the conversion path that he or she took. Use your quantitative data as a baseline and then use interviews to supplement your knowledge.
Assessing your data on a regular basis gives you a better picture of how people are not only coming to you but what in your specific method is prompting them to act. By breaking things down into various categories and looking at the demographic factors involved, you can help to isolate particular groups of your target market and identify the most appropriate way to reach out to them in the future.
Sometimes these data may even indicate metrics that you were not expecting to see but that can help drive your decisions in the future to capture your target market more effectively or market to a subsection of your market even better.