How much are you leveraging what you already know about your customers? By not using the data you do have access to, are you missing out on key insights and potential sales?
Data has been at the centre of so many conversations across all sectors, ever since the introduction of GDPR in May 2018. This piece of legislation applies to all businesses that process personal data of individuals in the European Union, regardless of where the business is located. For example, even a business based in the United States that serves customers in the UK is subject to this legislation.
The GDPR requires businesses to obtain explicit consent from individuals to collect and use their personal data, and to provide transparent information on how the data will be used. Those cookie policy banners that appear on every single website you visit? That’s done to keep those businesses compliant with GDPR.
The GDPR legislation also gives individuals the right to access, correct, and delete their personal data, and the right to be informed in the event of a data breach.
After all of this, why would a business still go to lengths to keep and utilise data? The benefits of being able to analyse the data you do have and act on it, far outweigh the steps you need to take to be compliant with GDPR.
Improve customer satisfaction and improve retention
Nobody is better placed to tell you what’s wrong with your business when it comes to customer experiences than your customers themselves. Customers will give you feedback at various points in their interactions with you, how they engage with your website, phone calls, interactions with your brand on social media and reviews.
By analysing all of these data points you can build an effective picture of where customers become frustrated and where they need you to improve. Taking actions on the back of this information can help improve your overall customer retention rate and turn one off purchases into repeats.
For example, if you’re not analysing your phone call data you might not know that customers are finding your automated call management systems annoying and they’re giving up trying to get through to the right department. By reviewing your call data you can learn this and simplify your systems, reducing customer friction, increasing the likelihood they speak to your sales team and in an ideal world get more value out of that interaction.
Personalised Marketing Campaigns
Whether you’re a big business or a small business, we’re confident that you’re watching the pennies and the pounds at the moment. Everyone is feeling the pinch and every business cost is being scrutinised, including the marketing budget.
Where some channels are good for brand awareness and reaching a wide audience, TV for example, customer data allows you to focus your efforts and speak directly to your audience.
Depending on the information you collect on your audience you can build personas, these insights allow you to tailor in on your audience’s interests and allow you to focus your marketing efforts and spend.
Let’s say you review your customer data and a picture starts to appear: women, 40-50, average income and largely based in the south of England. You could now take this information and apply it to your Facebook marketing campaigns so that you’re only targeting the areas where your audience is and only spending where you’re likely to have an impact and generate revenue.
Without reviewing the data you do have on your audience this insight would be lost and you could be wasting valuable budget targeting an audience that doesn’t exist.
Stay Ahead Of The Competition
With everyone being aware of how they’re spending their money it’s important that businesses take steps to stay ahead of the competition. Utilising customer data can help you stay ahead of the competition by providing you with insights and opportunities to improve your products, services, and customer experiences.
All the interactions customers have with your businesses are data points for you to review and learn from. All of these insights are opportunities for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and optimise your marketing efforts.
How do you track and analyse your customer’s data?
With the rules on data collection and storage becoming more strict as time goes on, it’s important to make sure the data you collect is relevant and secure.
To best see how your customers are engaging with your business we recommend a combination of Google Analytics, ideally GA4, and a CRM system.
A properly configured Google Analytics 4 will give you information on how visitors are finding your website, where they’re navigating to on your website and what pages are causing them to leave your website without converting.
If you’re already using Universal Analytics to track your website you’ll need to have set up a Google Analytics 4 profile by July 2023 to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable data.
Beyond your website, to track how they move through your sales funnel, when they get in touch, how many times they get in touch and their specific data you need a good CRM system.
We recommend Zoho Bigin, Zoho CRM or Pipedrive for keeping track of customer activity with a CRM.
It can be tricky to know where to start with a CRM or how to configure it to work with your existing website, this is where we can help. We can connect your website to a CRM system to give you access to this powerful data, we can even help you sift through this data and analyse it to uncover these insights.
If you’d like to discuss how data and CRM can transform your business, contact our team for a free consultation. We’d love to help you unlock the secrets of your data.
Wed, 05 April 2023