The key to success for any business is customer satisfaction. In the past, marketers only relied on traditional advertising platforms and methods to boost their overall sales. But luckily, due to the emergence of advanced technologies, the set-up has completely changed.
In order to grab and retain more customers, you need to understand their pain points and specific needs in accordance with a highly dynamic and changing marketplace. Additionally, due to intense competition, you will need to build a one to one relationship with every customer.
But the real question is how to achieve it? To explore its answer, let’s look at the unique strategy adopted by brands such as Uber and Airbnb where they have embraced data-driven insights to understand the requirements of their customers and modified their products accordingly fulfill those needs.
Yes, the realm of data science is rapidly growing because of advanced tools such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Soon the software development industry is anticipated to join hands with data science engineers who can be their guiding angels in analyzing big data that allow them to create intelligent, intuitive, and smarter solutions.
Let’s take a look at how data analytics can be the best weapon in your arsenal to empathize with your customers and maximize sales.
Why Your Business Needs To Be Data-Centric
It’s true that evaluating the sales figures and customer base are two integral tools to measure the success of an organization. But have you ever thought these insights provide you with all the essential indicators of measuring your success? No, because these figures don’t give details like:
- Who is purchasing your product and why?
- What is required to be done in order to thrive successfully in this competitive landscape?
- When and why are you gaining or losing customers in your sales pipeline?
In order to address these issues, you can easily leverage the power of data analytics. The inputs provided by this method can be efficiently used to understand each customer at a personal level and modify the entire business model so that to survive against competitors. But how you can use data analytics to explore customers’ minds and ultimately drive more sales? Let’s look at four major ways of doing it:
Facilitates Development Of Customized Products Tailored To Suit Specific Customer Needs
It’s true that every customer is valuable, but you can’t deny the fact that each of them have their own interests and demands. In order to cater to this diverse range of requirements, you need to build products tailored to suit these needs. But how to get the idea of what’s working and what’s not?
This can be done with data analytics where you have to collect customer feedback and gather all the data. By arranging the data properly, it can provide you with insights into what your customers are actually looking for. Working on these inputs you can tailor and improve the quality of your end products.
Seamless Segmentation
Gathering customer related data is inevitable for every organization, but the data is of no use if it’s not categorized logically. With the help of data analytics, you can classify the data into different sections on the basis of age, shopping habits, range, usage, location, etc.
Later on, marketers can use this data to create relevant messages and campaigns for each segment. They can customize their marketing tactics in order to be in sync with the specific requirements of that particular group.
In addition, segmentation also gives you an opportunity to identify the moneymaking groups for your business and hence you can pay full attention to optimizing your marketing efforts for those segments.
Supports Innovation & Creativity
Apart from Airbnb and Uber, there are several other brands who have understood the significance of data analytics and have become the flag bearers for instigating innovation. For instance, Waymo which is the Google brainchild and the very first self-driving car project is believed to produce 1 GB of new data each second comprising insights into driving safely.
But this isn’t the end. There are many other brands such as Lemonade, Careem, Starling, Monzo, Revolut, etc. who have incorporated advanced technologies such as AI and chatbots to analyze data and provide customers with a seamless experience.
Promotes The Policy Of Being “Light On One’s Feet”
Considering the volatile and agile marketplace, it has become mandatory for each and every entrepreneur to gain and sustain agility in their business model. It’s tough for them to convert new customers but it’s even tougher to retain the ones who are already there in the sales CRM.
Putting efforts in retaining the existing customer base is beneficial, according to one of the bestsellers The Loyalty Effect. The author has claimed that a 5% improvement in customer retention rates will yield between a 25 to 100% increase in profits across a wide range of industries.
But in order to cater to the existing customer base and retain it, you need to understand their pain points and tweak the offerings accordingly. For this, you need to follow a strategy that can be tailored quickly.
Data analytics can make sure that you always have the freshest dose of data that can be analyzed efficiently to stay abreast in terms of understanding your existing customers and offering solutions to cater to their changing needs.
After getting familiar with the significance of data analytics in understanding customer behaviour and how it might change in the future, it’s the time for some real action by exploring the right way to convert the raw data into actionable insights for making your brand much more profitable. Let’s reveal how you can do it.
Catch The Real Problem
Before gathering data, it’s equally important for you to have an idea of why and how are you going to use it. Also, you need to identify which pain point of your customers do you want to fix and how the data can be helpful for the purpose. This policy will allow you to be more focused and gather data which will definitely be relevant to fulfil your specific objective.
Make Sure To Blend All Three Metrics: Pay Attention To What, Why/How, What Next
You can’t apply insights into your business model randomly. For logical implementation, you need to concentrate on descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive aspects of analytics to give you a comprehensive understanding of what happened, why and how it happened, and what can happen in the future.
By blending all three metrics and combining data from each one these you can resolve the issues you want to. Otherwise, your data won’t serve the purpose and give your sales the boost it need.
Exploit The Reliable Systems
The decisions which you will make by evaluating the collected data will directly influence the overall business model. Therefore, you should make sure that you are leveraging standard systems and methods in order to gather data that can be accurate and meaningful. Also, the data should be accessible to everyone and easy to understand. Otherwise, your employees will only waste their precious time in understanding the raw information.
Take Help From The “Data Unicorns”
It’s obvious that you might not have the expert data analytics team who can exploit the power of data and convert the raw pieces of details into actionable insights. This is why if needed, you should take help of data professionals with correct abilities to perform this complex task to ensure that you hit the spot with precise vision.
In a nutshell, to maximize your sales it’s required to do a deep analysis of data for identifying patterns in customer conduct and market activities. This will allow you to improvise your products and target potential customers in order to attain long-term growth and brand recognition.
About Author: Anubhuti Shrivastava is a content crafter at Arkenea and Benchpoint. She is passionate about writing articles on topics related to design and the software development industry.