Data driven marketing strategies supported by customer insights can significantly boost the customer experience, leading to higher customer retention rates. Each customer, or customer segment, is unique, and it is necessary to understand the behaviors and needs of each segment to truly connect with them on a personal level that keeps them coming back for more.
Of course, there are many different ways to enhance the customer experience, but an enterprise wide quality data strategy is often the most effective. Simply put, customer focused data strategies provide businesses with key insights that help them implement marketing campaigns that are more engaging for customers. Data driven strategies offer the information needed to connect with customers on a whole other level that significantly improves their experience with a brand.
Why Customer Focused Data Needs to Be at the Heart of Your Business
Today, the vast majority of consumers are made up of multiple generations or segments, with their own unique needs and behaviors. Thus, it is necessary to utilize multigenerational marketing that is capable of appealing to a diverse audience. The more businesses diversify their marketing, the more customers they can draw in. Additionally, if a business uses data to thoroughly understand each unique customer segment they are marketing to, it will have more success retaining customers from each of those segments.
Boomers, for example, tend to prefer marketing that promotes ease of use along with superior customer service. Millennials on the other hand often prefer convenience and prioritize social connectivity, thus, they tend to be more influenced by engaging in social media marketing. Gen Z is similar to the Millennial generation but with even more of an emphasis on social connectivity and socially responsible practices.
Each of these generations is unique in their wants, needs, and behaviors, and all of them make up the consumer base that companies should be targeting. Thus, it is necessary to deliver marketing that is as varied as these segments to appease each of their individual lifestyles and desires. And this is achieved by using data strategies driven by customer focused insights.
The right data strategy can help a business better understand customer behavior, predict churn, and overall appeal to a wider range of customers, thereby enhancing loyalty and improving retention rates. Business owners and marketers alike need to constantly evaluate this data through
Best Data Strategies for Better Customer Experiences
All data driven marketing uses customer data, such as demographics and behavior trends to enhance customer engagement. However, not all strategies are as effective as others, and some are often overlooked. Below are some of the best strategies for businesses that truly want to understand each customer segment to develop the most optimal marketing campaigns that boost loyalty and retention.
Customer Segmentation Analysis
Conducting a customer segmentation analysis starts by dividing customers into groups based on common characteristics, such as behaviors and demographics. From there, user personas can be created for each group, allowing deeper discussion about the wants, needs, desires, and behaviors of that segment.
Once each segment is thoroughly analyzed, businesses will have more clearly defined personas, thus allowing them to create marketing that can more effectively target each of those segments.
Customer Sentiment Analysis
Customer sentiment refers to how customers feel about certain products or services. It’s important to try to better understand customer sentiment because it enables companies to get a better idea of how their product or service is being received. Specifically, it can tell businesses whether customers are happy about something, frustrated, excited, or even angered.
Once customer sentiment is better understood, companies can then make necessary changes to the products or services offered to ensure improved customer satisfaction moving forward. As a whole, customer sentiment analysis can help companies better track customer satisfaction, improve product development, enhance customer services, reduce customer churn, and help with crisis management.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
A Customer Effort Score (CES) is one of those data insights that is often overlooked. CES measures the effort a customer or customer segment has put into interacting with a business and its products or services. Companies can analyze this type of data by simply providing polls or surveys where customers are asked to rate ease of engagement on a scale of one to seven.
Additionally, businesses can also seek out a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is done by asking customers how likely they would be to recommend a product or service on a scale of -100 to 100.
This is a very straightforward way of tracking customer satisfaction, which can provide valuable insights to help a company improve its offerings.
Root Cause Analysis
Often your data can point toward issues in your marketing process that you may have been unaware of in the first place. This is called a root cause analysis. If your marketing campaign isn’t reaching your desired audience, a root cause analysis can help you in your data collection to find the right demographic. This is typically through several steps:
- Identifying the problem
- Collecting data and analyzing trends in the data
- Hypothesizing root causes based on the data
- Crafting solutions
- Processing results from these solutions
Often this isn’t a one-and-done solution. You might have to run through it a couple of times based on the trends you find in your data set.
Customer Communications Calendar
Data driven strategies can also help a business develop a better communications calendar with regard to when it’s best to reach out and connect with customers. For example, customer churn refers to those periods when customers stop interacting with a brand and buying their products. Thus, that would be a great time to reach out and communicate with customers to try to reel them back in.
Knowing when to communicate with customers based on their behaviors can help companies boost their profits by encouraging customers to make purchases during times when they usually do not. Reaching out to customers during these times can also show customers that you care about them, which can help boost loyalty and increase retention.
Wrapping Up
At the end of the day, the key focus of any data driven strategy for customer retention should be to build better customer relationships. A company’s customers are like the foundation of their business. Without customers, there wouldn’t be a business to run in the first place. So companies must boost engagement and improve the overall experiences that customers have when interacting with their brand as much as possible. The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they are to return and remain loyal to a business.
