Customer-centricity and customization are terms that are often used when it comes to business in general and marketing in particular. They say, ‘customer is king’, that all business operations should focus on providing seamless customer experience and that all departments should be aligned towards this common goal. Customer experience is how customers relate to and perceive a brand. Providing seamless customer experience begins with product design stage itself. The product/ service should meet be what customers’ needs and must reflect customer journey and intent. The brand needs to be present at the right place and at the right time to create AHA moments for the customers. Product and customer service should meet up to customer expectations in terms of quality, delivery and performance.
The development of technology has definitely made it possible for brands to provide seamless customer experience as well as to address broken customer experiences. With the advent of the internet and technology, enormous amounts of data are generated every minute of every day about customers. If this raw data is analyzed and trends, patterns and correlations are found using data analytics, it will do a world of good for brands. It has helped brands and marketers, who have used data analytics, to sharpen marketing strategies, create AHA moments, ensure customized targeting and provide the best customer experience. This is the reason why even senior marketers are equipping themselves with big data and data analytics through online analytics courses. These courses from top-notch institutions and universities from across the globe help the learners to gain an in-depth understanding of tools, methods, trends and best practices in the field of analytics, and ways of extracting and analyzing data as well as its effective application for business/ marketing success.
Customer Valuation
Customer valuation is a process by which brands determine the strategy for targeting customers and which customers to target to fulfil its objective of profit maximization. For effective customer valuation, brands gather past data about customers, understand their purchase history and frequency, the money spent on purchases, etc. Based on this analysis, brands will be able to identify customers who are loyal, who have highest purchase frequency, who spending is highest and accordingly forecast potential future purchases. In a nutshell, they understand which customers are most valuable to them. By spending time and resources on such customers through targeting, they will be able to maximize profits and ensure business success. In a nutshell, customer valuation helps brands to focus a majority of their attention and target their campaigns on their best customers. A rule of 80-20 is used.
To understand this better, let us look at an example. Say Banana Crafts is a company that sells art and craft supplies. Most of its sales happens through the e-commerce platform and some through its retail store. Banana Crafts collects customer data through questionnaires and surveys about needs, preferences, buying habits and demographic details. Based on this data, it will develop a scoring system for customer valuation through which customers are scored for total money spent on purchases, regularity and repeat purchases, brand loyalty and response to promotional campaigns. Banana Crafts now has an insight into customer value and can forecast the probability of future repeat purchases as well as attrition. They can segment their customers and target promotional campaigns at customers who have higher value and a higher probability of repeat purchases and accordingly customize promotions. This way Banana Crafts can justify its promotional campaigns and marketing budget with the high ROI.
Customer Valuation Analytics and Targeting
As mentioned earlier, customer valuation requires the right data about customers, their journey, their intents and their struggles. Such data can be collected from customers themselves through surveys and questionnaires and through data analytics tools and software. Website behavior, social media activity, etc. along with purchase history, frequency, brand loyalty, etc. are gold according to experts and must be consciously collected by brands. Big data and data analytics actually draws the line between customer stereotyping and customer segmentation, i.e. data helps the brands to customize their strategies and plans to target customers rather than strategizing based on assumptions of how certain groups are expected to behave.
Experts insist that choosing the correct metrics and analytic tools is crucial to the quality of analytics and insights that become available to the brand. So, brands must choose these with utmost care. Technical and departmental silos need to be broken and data must flow seamlessly between different departments in the company. Experts also insist that brands must not stop with collecting and analyzing all this data but must use these to customize and target customers, improve ROI and reduce attrition. If not, analytics will only be a futile exercise and marketing will not yield much results or conversions. To equip yourself with skills in data analytics and use it effectively in tailoring your marketing campaigns, you should sign yourself up in an online analytics course today.