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Understanding How Customers Interact With Your Business Can Drive More Sales

Personalized data can allow a business to improve customer retention.


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Tealfeed Guest Blog

3 years ago | 6 min read

When it came to interacting with your customers, businesses used to be more straightforward. Customers would come into your physical store and shop for a product, and you could interact with them face-to-face, assist them in finding what they were looking for, and answer any questions they had in real-time.

Today, however, this is obviously no longer the case for many businesses. In fact, most retailers will never put a face to a customer name.

This digital transformation has not only changed how you interact with your customers, but it has also created more competition for businesses.

This is why it’s important for business owners today to have an understanding of how their customers interact with their business online. Doing so will create loyal, happier customers, and more importantly — it will drive more sales.

How Digital Transformation Impacts Your Business

In this digital age data matters since it is the only way for an online business to come to “know” their customers.

Hubspot has reported that the leading challenge of 63% of companies is generating traffic and leads, yet a study from Teradata found that only 41% of marketing executives were using customer engagement data to aid their marketing strategy.

The solution to getting more leads is not simply increasing your marketing budget or running more ads, but creating the right marketing strategy paired with a great customer experience.

Let’s take a look at how to do this.

How to Truly Understand Your Customers

The first step in creating a better marketing strategy and a better customer experience is truly understanding your customers. What this means is creating a profile out of your data, who is shopping for your product or service, where do they live, are they visiting your website or Facebook page? This data is what will eventually guide your marketing strategy and customer service approach.

Here are some of the best ways to do this:

Determining Where Your Customers Are Interacting With Your Business

This is the first and most important step, because if you don’t know where your customers are interacting with you (these are called customer touchpoints), then you can’t accurately apply the following principals for improving customer service and driving more sales.

The more touchpoints you have, the more data you have available to you.

Once you have identified your customer touchpoints, you need to look at the data you have available to you at each one. For example, review the Google Analytics for your website — where does most of your traffic come from? Are Google Ads driving traffic? What about Facebook? Or are the majority of your inquiries coming from Organic Search?

This information is important because it informs your customer service and marketing efforts and tells you where you should be placing ads, which social media channels you should be posting on, and what pages of your website should be updated. It also allows you the opportunity to identify and improve on touchpoints you may not have realized existed for your business.

Understanding How Your Customers Are Interacting With Your Business

Once you understand where customers are interacting with your business, you can move on to understand how they are interacting with your business.

Are your customers primarily emailing you? Do they reach out via Facebook messenger or Instagram DMs? Or are they using your website’s chat widget? It’s likely a combination of different mediums, but one or two may stand out from the rest. Redirect your efforts to strengthen the communication sources your customers are utilizing the most. It’s also a good idea to look at how customer’s are utilizing your website.

Any action a customer takes on your website provides you with valuable insight into your customers’ behaviors.

What pages are they lingering on? Which ones have high bounce rates? Understanding the behavioral data of your customers will give you insight into what your audiences do and don’t like and enable you to create a more robust website.

Another thing to look at is whether mobile views have a high bounce rate, which may be alerting you to the fact that your website is not mobile-friendly. By making some adjustments and ensuring your website design is responsive you will be able to increase your mobile views.

You also want to take note of whether customers tend to spend a lot of time on a particular webpage. If you find there are some pages that stand out from the rest of your website you should analyze that page’s content to see what might be retaining their attention and apply it to other pages.

Putting Customer Data to Action

Now that you have a better understanding of where to get customer data, and how to use it, you need to act on this data and create a new marketing strategy.

This is an important step, a study by Villanova University found that 29% of marketers in the US say their marketing analytics has helped them grow their organization’s sales revenues by as much as 26%.

When evaluating the data you may notice some trends or patterns emerging among your customers or your website, for example, you might:

  • Identify a growing geographic location
  • Discover keywords that are driving large numbers of views
  • Learn that specific product pages that have high click rates

Such information can show you exactly what pages to update, what keywords to use in ads, and what geographic locations to target. In turn, here are some key changes you should be applying:

Integrating Intelligent Customer Engagement

Intelligent customer engagement might sound complicated, but really what this comes down to is becoming more accessible to your customers using tools for real-time engagement. This means actively monitoring and responding to customers on your social media channels, utilizing live message widgets on your website, and improving your response times for phone and email inquiries.

Most people today don’t want to sit on hold or wait for an email response making live a chat a perfect solution. Tools like Live Chat from Re:amaze enables you to respond to customers quickly, while giving them a convenient way to reach out to your customer service department.

Creating Better Ads

When it comes to online ads your business may be advertising on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, or even LinkedIn Ads. Because there are so many options, you need to know which are most effective for your business.

While this may take a little trial and error, understanding where your customers are coming from which help you make a better, more informed decision.

Additionally, your website data will tell you what keywords you should be using and can indicate which pages you should be driving customers to on your website. This is also a great opportunity to take advantage of remarketing ads on both Google and Facebook.

Cloning High-Value Customers

This is a secondary step to creating better ads. Once you identify who your high-value customers are, you should create custom audiences based on this information. By doing so you will be able to target and acquire more customers that exhibit similar behavior as your most profitable customers, and are more likely to make a purchase.

Updating Your Website

We’ve touched on this above, but it’s worth mentioning again. Taking the data you’ve gathered and using it to create a more robust website will do a number of things for your business.

First, it will improve your SEO rankings, which will help you appear in a higher position in Google searches. Second, it will make your website more appealing to current and potential customers. By adding more responsive features, building out your content, and making your website more easy to navigate you’ll see both an increase in website traffic and sales.

Creating Personalized Experiences

Personalized website experiences can be created using customer data to serve your customers with personalized content and product suggestions based on their past behavior.

Personalized data can allow a business to improve customer retention, increase the likelihood of repeat purchases, and upsell and/or cross-sell products.

Make Data Work for You Today

The task of evaluating customer data and applying it to your marketing strategy is an ongoing journey. Data reveals valuable insights about your customers and your business which helps you understand the relationship between the two, so it’s important that you continually seek out to improve your in-house new as new analytics and information become available. By applying what you’ve learned above you will be able to attract new customers, better serve your current ones, and increase sales

This article was originally published by Kristin floridia on medium.

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