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Customer behavior analytics is a must if you want to thrive in a digital world full of competent competitors. Also, many marketing and advertising efforts, such as behavioral targeting, require precise customer behavior data and analysis.
The most thriving companies have a customer-centric outlook. They are creative companies with high revenues and growth rates. The statistics of companies that use customer behavior data for their CRO tools and strategies demonstrate this point.
Forbes’ list of 100 customer-centric companies reveals many well-known brand names like Apple, Amazon, and DHL. It’s proof of the positive impact of a customer-centric approach.
Surely, customer-centricity strategies would be hard to implement without a deep look into customers’ behavioral patterns.
This article discusses the reasons and impacts of using customer behavior analytics. We also provide you with a step-by-step guide on implementing it into your business.
Let’s dive in to see the reason behind the significance of behavior data-driven strategies in today’s marketplace. But to give you a heads up, if you are looking for a cost-efficient user behavior analytics tool with an intuitive user interface, sign up for WatchThemLive now and get access to all the data you need to understand your customers deeply.
What Is Customer Behavior Data
Customer behavior data is a form of data that shows all your customers’ activities during their purchasing process. These activities can include purchasing an item, abandoning a shopping cart, or canceling an order. All of them are considered customer behaviors and they need to be tracked, measured, analyzed, and optimized.
What Is a Customer Behavior Analysis
A customer behavior analysis is a complete investigation of how your customers act across each interaction point of their journey. Conducting customer data analysis properly allows you to uncover your customer needs; so you can satisfy them and increase your customer loyalty.
Why Conducting Customer Behavior Analytics Is So Important
You should conduct customer behavior analysis to predict customer values and optimize and personalize content. Without customer-centricity, how can you enhance retention and provide exceptional customer support?
Let’s jump in to discuss how user behavior analytics helps businesses:
1. Focusing on the Most Valuable Customers
User behavior analytics help you predict customers’ value and focus on the most value-generating buyer personas. Only by analyzing the behavioral patterns of customers can you identify and target the most profitable customer groups.
2. Optimizing and Personalizing Content Marketing Efforts
Optimize content delivery time and channel using customer behavior analytics data. It enables you to present your content when your customers most probably expect and engage with it. A good understanding of their lifestyle gives you valuable information on the place or platform to publish content.
Content personalization is another practical way of increasing audience engagement with a brand. Research indicates that 80% of B2B companies that personalized their content found it very effective compared to non-personalized content:
Some responding companies didn’t adopt a content personalization approach in the same research. For example, when examined, over 50% reported whether they didn’t have access to data or technology needed for content personalization. And that was their reason for not adopting a content personalization strategy.
There could be no better way to emphasize the role of consumer behavior data in customizing content than these interesting statistics.
3. Enhancing Customer Retention Rate
Customer retention rate should be tracked as an important marketing metric. You can improve this metric by acknowledging your customers before leaving you for a competitor.
While acquiring customers is essential, it’s more imperative to keep them happy and engaged. By distinguishing positive and negative consumer traits, a behavior assessment will assist the staff in lowering the churn rate.
One of the advantages of customer behavior analytics is understanding your customers and their buying habits. Also, having access to such data makes it easy for you to develop tools and strategies to retain them.
How to Collect Customer Behavior Data
There are different methods for gathering data about customers.
Session recording tools are one of the best tools for collecting consumers’ behavior data. These platforms act like CCTV and track every movement users make on your site.
Unlike other methods of analyzing customers’ behavior, recordings and heatmap tools track user behavior without disturbing the customer journey. This results in unconscious participation of users in your customer behavior analysis, which helps you generate more accurate data.
Other methods of gathering data for customer behavior analytics are through:
- Surveys,
- Interviews,
- Blog and email subscriptions,
- Social media,
- Transaction history,
- Marketing analytics.
How to Conduct Customer Behavior Analysis
Customer behavior is influenced by personality traits, social trends, and psychological responses. Now that we know the reason for its importance in the business world, let’s discuss how to perform it in six easy steps:
Step #1: Audience Segmentation
Categorizing your customer base is a good start for analyzing customer behavior. Next, try identifying the characteristics of your most valuable customers. These characteristics can include their age, gender, location, interests, and habits.
Step #2: Examine each Group
Analyze each customer segment’s needs and perceived values that result in buying from you. For example, is it the urgency that matters most to them? Is it the convenience you offer by your eCommerce website?
Additionally, you can ask customer behavior analytics interview questions to gather more valid data. Finally, look for similar traits in each group for qualitative customer behavior data.
Step #3: Extract Quantitative Data
Besides the qualitative data collected through interviews, you can send out a customer analytics behavior questionnaire to gather quantitative data.
You can also extract stats from your blog subscribers and social media insights. Also, if you have built your eCommerce website on Shopify, you can use customer behavior analytics in Shopify to extract data.
Step #4: Compare Different Data Types
Look for recurring trends in your customers’ behavior patterns by comparing qualitative and quantitative data. Use the data sets as a guide at each customer journey stage. Analyze your data based on customer experience at each stage and for each customer segment.
Once you have done this, you can find trends and patterns in their traits and obstacles in each stage. It’s important to have a particular focus on your valuable customer segment, the ones who generate most of the revenue for you.
Step #5: Test your Analysis in a Campaign
Now that you have an idea of what each customer segment needs, it’s time to use the data. You can apply your findings to customize your next campaign for various customer groups.
As mentioned earlier, you can apply customer habits analytics to deliver content on the most suitable channel. Moreover, test your analytics and ask your customers to check how they are experiencing the new changes. Finally, use the session replay service of WatchThemLive to observe changes in user interaction with your website in real-time.
Step #6: Analyze the Outcomes
You’ll undoubtedly want to see how the modifications succeeded after you’ve given them enough time to evaluate. To assess the impact of the new campaigns, use metrics such as conversion rate and CLV. It is crucial to regularly review the findings because emerging technology, politics, and events affect customer behavior.
Benefits of Customer Behavior Analysis
In today’s marketing industry, businesses are using data gathered from analyzing users’ behavior to plan their marketing strategies. This data helps you make more informed decisions and limit the chance of failure. Therefore, if you haven’t paid enough attention to behavior analytics, it’s time to make a change.
As a business owner, you might ask yourself, ‘How can customer behavior analytics help me improve my business?’. So, let’s discuss some of the benefits of consumer behavior analysis to give you more reasons to give it a shot.
- User behavior analytics helps you Identify new trends and sales opportunities.
- It enables you to segment customers and design targeted campaigns to increase the chance of conversion.
- In addition to customer segmentation, customer behavior analysis helps you to understand the customer’s personality and design your customer journey accordingly.
- Behavioral analytics approaches provide you with a clear vision about which marketing strategy attracted more consumers to your brand.
One of the best use cases for customer behavior analytics is identifying trends before important social events. For example, if you are an e-commerce owner selling dresses online. By analyzing customers buying habits’ you can easily identify what is trending this year and shift your focus on that. This way, you can attract more customers and seize the opportunity.
Challenges of Understanding Customer Behavior Analytics
Thanks to new technologies and the development of website analytics tools, analyzing customers’ behaviors is not complicated these days. But, turning that information into actionable insight is another story. After generating information, it’s time to put customer behavior data to good use. However, you might face different challenges during this process. There are some common mistakes that negatively affect customer behaviour analytics data.
1. Not Having a Goal
In order to integrate data into your strategies, you have to specify what you are trying to accomplish by analyzing customers’ behavior.
- Are you trying to find out about the friction in your sales funnel?
- Do you want to increase conversion rates?
- Do you want to discover the reason behind shopping cart abandonment?
- Are you trying to encourage users to repeat their purchases?
Defining your objectives will help you understand what you should be looking for.
2. Not Using Data Visualization Techniques
Consumer behavior analysis can be confusing sometimes, and this can decrease your understanding of the data. But, representing data in graphs, charts, and maps makes it easier to understand. After all, 90% of the information is transmitted to the brain in visual form.
Therefore, visual representation of data can be a great strategy for analyzing and predicting customers’ behavior patterns.
3. Using a Small Sample Size
Statistically accurate results require a fine sample size. If your sample is too small, you’ll lose valuable details about your customers. Since the data only represents a small number of visitors, any marketing campaign that is planned according to it might result in targeting the wrong audience. And just like that, you’ll lose valuable time and resources.
The general rule for generating accurate results is to include at least 10% of the total number of visitors as your sample size. For example, if your eCommerce store receives an average of 10,000 visitors per month, you should analyze the behavior of at least 1,000 customers.
4. Not Including All Channels
Another common mistake in customer behavior analysis is limiting data analysis to one channel. This way, you are not getting the full picture. However, analyzing the traffic from other channels (besides your website) can be very difficult. Therefore, using a behavior analytics tool that covers different channels is crucial.
What Platform Can Help with Customer Behavior Analytics
WatchThemLive is a great tool that can assist you with conducting customer behavior analysis.
This platform empowers you with functional tools to check visitor behavior and engagement on your website. It’s an easy-to-use platform that offers the following customer behavior analytics features:
Session Replays
Session recording is a useful feature of WatchThemLive, providing you with valuable qualitative data on visitor behavior. What gives you a better idea of your users’ behavior than seeing how they behave on your site?
You can watch every movement of your users from clicks to mouse movements through session replays and understand a lot about their behavior and how they are interacting with your website right now!
Heatmaps
Heatmaps show you the most interesting parts of your website from the visitors’ eyes. So place your most important CTAs where it gets the most attention. It’s easy, right?
Web Analytics
Website analytics provides you with invaluable information about your visitors’ behavior such as, what devices and operating systems they use or which countries they are from, and their browser languages. So you can deliver a superior user experience and increase their engagement on your website.
Goal Tracking
Goal Tracking is an excellent feature on the WatchThemLive, allowing you to show how effectively your website engages visitors to convert them. So you can identify what’s working and what’s not working on your website and measure the success of your marketing efforts.
If you want to become familiar with their other features, Watch the video below:
WatchThemLive Pricing
WatchThemLive starts free. No credit cards are required to sign up on WatchThemLive. It offers 1,500 pageviews and 1,000 replays, three website heatmaps, and unlimited goals on its free plan.
Also, it takes 1-2 minutes to sign up and access the dashboard. Then, you can add your website to the dashboard and access data after embedding the code on your website.
For more session replays and heatmaps, upgrade your plan to premium. The premium plans start as low as $29 per month and go up to $99 per month.
FAQs on Consumer Data Analytics
After discussing user behavior analysis procedures, benefits, and challenges, let’s answer some of the questions people also asked about this subject.
What Are the Different Types of Customers?
Seven common types of customers include loyal customers, new customers, potential customers, discount customers, impulse customers, angry customers, and unsure customers. By analyzing customer behavior you can understand each customer belongs to which type and take the right approach to grab their attention.
What Are the Factors Affecting Consumer Behavior?
Have you ever wondered why your choices are different from your friends? Lots of factors (family, motivation, age, income, etc.) impact our shopping behavior. But they are categorized into five common factors: psychological factors, social factors, cultural factors, personal factors, and economical factors.
How Can Data Analytics Improve Customer Service?
Customer behavior analysis helps you measure customer satisfaction. If there is something that troubles your customers, you can easily detect the problem and take immediate action.
In addition, analyzing customer behavior enables you to deliver hiper-personalized support. Personalized responses and services are two of the main elements in boosting customer experience. In this matter, your support team can tailor the responses according to users’ preferences and personalities. Therefore, you can make them feel respected.
what are the 4 types of consumer behavior?
Well, we’ve got complex buying behavior, dissonance-reducing buying behavior, habitual buying behavior, and variety-seeking buying behavior. Each type relates to how consumers approach making purchasing decisions.
When we talk about consumer behavior, what does that mean exactly?
Consumer behavior is basically the study of how people make decisions about what to buy, when to buy it, where to buy it, and how much to spend. It’s all about understanding why people do what they do when it comes to purchasing goods and services.
What are the 5 characteristics of consumer behavior?
You’ve got culture, social status, personal factors, psychological factors, and the decision-making process. Each plays a role in shaping how consumers behave and what they choose to buy.
Why is consumer behavior important?
Well, if you’re a business owner or marketer, understanding consumer behavior is essential to creating successful marketing campaigns and building customer relationships. The more you know about your target audience and what drives their purchasing decisions, the better equipped you are to meet their needs and build brand loyalty.
What factors can affect consumer behavior?
There are many factors at play, including cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors. For example, a person’s culture and upbringing can influence their buying habits, as can their income, lifestyle, and personality traits.
How can you identify consumer behavior?
One way is through market research, which can involve surveys, focus groups, and other methods of gathering data on consumer preferences and behavior. You can also analyze sales data and track website analytics to gain insights into customer behavior.
What are the four factors affecting consumer behavior?
As we mentioned earlier, those factors are cultural, social, personal, and psychological. Understanding how each of these factors influences consumer behavior is key to developing effective marketing strategies.
What are the five factors most affecting consumer behavior?
Well, that’s open to interpretation, but in general, cultural factors, social factors, personal factors, psychological factors, and situational factors are all important influencers.
What are the eight factors that influence consumer behavior?
That’s a great question! The eight factors are cultural, social, personal, psychological, economic, situational, marketing mix, and consumer decision-making process. Each factor plays a role in shaping consumer behavior, and understanding how they all interact is key to developing successful marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Customer behavior analytics can contribute greatly to a company’s performance, especially in marketing. Throughout this article, we covered three main questions regarding customer behavior analysis.
First, we discussed several important reasons why it is so important. The benefits include identifying key customer segments, customizing content marketing efforts, and increasing retention.
Then, we outlined the stages required to conduct customer behavior analysis. Briefly, they consist of identifying customer segments, examining them for qualitative and quantitative data, analyzing data, and testing insights.
Finally, we introduced the WatchThemLive platform that assists with your customer data requirements for easier access to user behavior data. Give WatchThemLive a try and sign up for FREE.
