Using Customer Data Analytics to Increase Your Marketing ROI

In a post-pandemic world with slashed marketing budgets, data analytics are critical to making the most of your advertising dollars. Recent statistics show that data-driven marketing that leverages customer personalization can earn a business 5-8x ROI.

Personalization can be reached through public records and other reverse lookup tools, which will give you information about your audience’s behavior, interests, location, marriage status and more.

Data analytics includes both public records as well as information collected by your marketing, sales, and customer support departments. Even big players like Unilever are increasingly relying on consumer data to swiftly change their tactics and marketing spend to meet a challenging global environment.

Of course, leveraging data is not an exclusive domain of giant corporations. Businesses of all sizes can use customer data analytics for higher ROI.

Collecting and Storing Customer Analytics Data

First things first: how do you accumulate and store data for your company?

Let’s break this down.

Collect Data

To start with, gathering information about your customers is a combination of tools and strategies. Most marketing tools that you’re already using provide such information.

A prime example is Google Analytics. It helps you track and view data for your content regarding how many views and interactions your content has received. This data can be used to view which blogs, or whatever content you’re posting, is the most popular with users.

With this information, you can start sculpting your content in ways that drive more traffic. There are other popular tools that offer to track as well; these include:

• Optimizely
• Hotjar
• Yandex Metrica

These tools also provide insights into customer behavior but on a basic level. All these tools provide built-in report modules, but you will be able to track data only from these tools. You can’t import and combine data from multiple sources. It is not enough to make sense of the data and make informed decisions. This brings us to our next point.

Sort Your Data

Once you have enough info at hand, it’s time to make it understandable. This is where a customer data platform (CDP) comes into play. Popular platforms in 2021 include:

• Blueshift
• Insider
• Emarsys
• Totango
• Optimove

CDPs sort your data and direct it to the right place where you can analyze it for insights. With the help of these tools, you can achieve company-wide data integration and consistency.

In short, it is easier to analyze sorted data as compared to unstructured data. You will also have to create a tracking plan at this stage, which is a document or spreadsheet outlining the strategy for customer data collection across all departments.

You can learn more about turning your data into information on our blog.

Store Your Data

Moving on: the sorted data needs to be stored in a data warehouse. Storage is critical for data analytics for many reasons such as the storage amount, speed of retrieving data from it, safety of your data from breaches, and redundancy if hardware fails…

A data warehouse stores data collected from your website, business applications, databases, and other sources. It also keeps your data organized for easy access and analysis.

Some of the best data warehouses include:

• ClicData
• BigQuery
• Postgres
• Redshift

Some companies go for in-house data warehouses, but we don’t recommend it even if you have a technical background (read why here).

Cloud data warehouses have their pros and cons, but they are typically the best way to store your data. After all, the ability to access your data from anywhere, and at any given time is essential to your business.

Your data remains secure and backed up on multiple servers. This ensures that you never lose your critical data no matter what!

Why You Need Customer Analytics

Before getting too far ahead, let’s go over why customer analytics matters to a business.

There are infinite ways in which analytics prove valuable to a company, but it all boils down to creating a personalized experience for your customers.

You will be able to meet customers at their point of need, exactly where they are hanging out, be it social media, email, or YouTube.

Taking a step back, consumer analytics will help your marketing and sales departments better understand the customer journey. As a result, you can make the buying process smoother, thereby earning more money on every marketing dollar spent.

On another level, you can use customer analytics to develop products and services that your customers like.

Here are the two main KPIs of customer analytics.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

It’s the sum of marketing and sales costs divided by the number of customers acquired. It tells you how much you spend on average to obtain a single customer.

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

The LTV is calculated as the average annual revenue per customer divided by customer churn (when customers leave) rate. This metric will tell you how much revenue you will earn from an average customer from the moment they join you to the moment they leave.

The rule of thumb is to spend money on acquisition sources that bring the highest LTV, preferably on a low CAC, and data analytics will help you find and optimize these acquisition channels.

4 Ways to Achieve Success with Public Data & Analytics

Analytics involves data collected in-house as well as public records. Public data includes credit information, online search queries, voting records, age, and so on. This kind of data can help you determine factors like:

• Income levels
• Family status
• Political/religious/ethical beliefs
• Buying preferences

Here are 4 ways to leverage public data and consumer analytics in your B2C company:

1.   Make Better Marketing Decisions

To state the obvious, data collection and analysis will help you make accurate marketing decisions for a better response and higher ROI. These decisions include factors like:

• Choice of the platform: Is it more cost-efficient for you to spend your resources on outbound email marketing or going down the path of social selling? 
• Time: When will your campaigns have the best interaction rate? When is the best time to start or stop a specific type of campaign?
• Preferred mode of communication: Is your audience more responsive to targeted emails than phone calls?
• Frequency of communication: Do your customers prefer no more than a single outreach a week, or you need to communicate with them daily?

For instance, your analytics may tell you that most of your customers prefer email communication and that they check their inbox around 9-11 am from Monday to Friday. So, you can then launch a personalized email campaign using tools like Mailchimp, Sendinblue or HubSpot.

Analytics may also reveal that emailing thrice a week improves results while emailing every day lowers your click-through rate (CTR).

2.   Track and Respond to Changing Consumer Behavior

Coming back to the example of Unilever; they have, in the words of CEO Graeme Pitkethly: ‘dynamically relocated’ budgets thanks to customer data analysis. Examples include removing TV and outdoor ads (due to low traffic and high risks) and relocating resources into skincare, home, and hygiene products, i.e. segments that offer higher immediate ROI.

Agility is the name of the game now, which means you should have the resources and expertise to follow the data where it leads instead of playing it safe and hoping for results.

3.   Compare Your Perception to Data (and Adjust)

Let’s return to CAC and LTV.

If an ad is bringing in a high number of customers, common sense is to spend more on that source. However, you must dig a little deep and look at the big picture. What if the CAC is high and the LTV low? In this case, you will lose money in the long run, no matter how many customers the ad brings in.

Along with the website analytic tools, you can also get insights from your payment vendor.

Ultimately, you must adjust your strategy for long-term results, as in – spend on platforms and campaigns that offer the highest LTV. That’s where the smart money is.

4.   Engage Your Customers on Their Terms

In the end, it’s all about knowing what makes your customers tick. Data will help you determine exactly what it is that drives people to buy your product or service. Specifically, you will be able to map out their customer journey and know exactly at what point they pull out their credit card.

For instance, your data may show that your visitors spend a lot of time on the chatbox when they come to your website before they move forward. And their chat experience determines how far they go in the sales cycle. In this case, you should spend money on improving their chat experience.

Once you know which behaviors lead to higher retention, you’ll be able to reduce churn and shorten your sales cycle.

Understand Your Customers with Customer Analytics

Analytics is a science, but at its heart, it is about forming deeper connections with humans. Your customers are people like you and me. The best companies with the most loyal customers are tapping into data to improve their customers’ experience, which creates a big challenge for start-ups and SMBs, as the more loyal and well-treated the customers are for the giants, the harder it is to convince them to join you.

Analytics also help you make the best of meager marketing budgets. Instead of quarterly or annual budgeting in the old days, you can now measure, test, reallocate, and optimize in real-time. It enables you to move towards high-performing channels, reduce short-term losses, and make the most of your resources while keeping your customers at the center of it all.

Leverage your customer data with a BI tool

To better understand your customer you need to make sense of all the data you have in hand, and only a proper business intelligence tool can help you achieve that.

With ClicData, you can bring data from Google Analytics, your CRM, CDP, databases, social media and marketing applications into a centralized data warehouse. Centralizing your customer data is the first step of creating a single source of truth for your sales and marketing teams.

Now that your data has been centralized, you are able to build meaningful and actionable metrics -such as the ones mentioned earlier – CAC, CLTV, but also your marketing ROI, your customer NPS and CSAT and so many more. By combining data from multiple sources, you’re able to build derived metrics that enable your sales and marketing teams to make informed decisions.

And of course, the best way to monitor these KPIs is through interactive dashboards with up-to-date data that you can share across your organization. 

Conclusion

To sum up, data analytics done correctly is a proven game-changer for companies in all industries. The future of data analytics will also bring greater challenges and opportunities, which means you should start investing now. So, the question we put to you is: what will your strategy be?

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