An Ultimate Guide to Efficient Customer Analysis

If we talk about the driving force behind efficient marketing, what do you think it could be? Huge budgets, good visuals, great ads, and unique creative ideas? Well, all of that is important, but it fades in comparison to simply knowing your customer and their habits. Just how a stand-up comedian knows which jokes will land the most laughs, your business should know how to make marketing and sales processes more efficient. Look at Facebook. It transitioned from just a social network to arguably the world’s largest advertising market by allowing advertisers to know their customers a lot better. So, this guide is definitely going to be helpful to every entrepreneur and organization out there. Let’s get to know how to do proper customer analysis!

Customer analysis or customer research is a set of activities done in order to gain knowledge and/or insights about the habits of your customers. What does that do? Well, to begin with, it’s the core and most important set of information that your marketing relies on. Furthermore, having more data about your customers can help you improve every side of your business, beginning with communication and PR, ending with technical features on your app, languages to translate your website to, etc.

Also, customer analysis is mostly being used by two departments within your business - marketing or management. These two areas rely on customer analytics very much, meaning that you can gather a whole lot of useful information from the creation of a customer profile.

Back in the past, customer analysis was done with a focus group in a room (still done on many occasions). However, with the emergence of international e-commerce businesses, having a focus group became too time-consuming, not worth it both financially and information gained-wise.

Today, doing customer analysis is all about implementing the right tools at the right places. The easiest way to gather data (even after the controversial update on iOS14 and harsh GDPR requirements in the EU) is through Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics.

These two tools are must-use for modern-day businesses looking to succeed in the 21st century. Having website visitors and social media traffic allows each commercial enterprise to gather helpful information that will benefit their business. Whether you’re in B2B, B2C or C2B (or whichever else), doing customer analysis is always beneficial. If you are having a hard time trying to curb Google Analytics and Facebook Business to work for you, draft a simple Customer Satisfaction survey on Google Forms or any other platform just to gain information.

If you want to gather data outside of your website or online space, you have to carry out live surveys, invite focus groups, have questionnaires to fill out, etc. It’s mundane and not super creative or fun to do, but it works.

Doing customer analysis is all about data. The more of it you can harvest, the better you will be off. So, what you need to do is choose the right tools, ask the right questions and look for ways to integrate more data analysis into your enterprise. For example, the Atlasmic Track app is ready-built to tackle everyday challenges, related to providing excellent customer service. Besides being an intuitive choice for chatting with customers, you can also gather a lot of data and information which helps in both short and long-term goals for your analytics.

Furthermore, great customer analysis is very structured and always provides an outcome. Here’s a short visual chart that can show you how a proper customer analysis procedure should be carried out. It’s all about finding solutions that work rather than just speculating and talking about theory. Great customer analysis revolves around solving problems and improving metrics.

Poor customer analysis will be done in a chaotic manner with no clear end goal in mind. Let’s give an example.

Your business isn’t happy with the 4.4-star evaluation that you have on TrustPilot. After reading the whole 1,000 reviews, you’ve found that the main reason people rated you either one or two stars was because their issues weren’t solved properly by customer support. They either couldn’t get the right answers over the phone or were directed to contact another representative which took ages. So, you have a clear problem right in front of you. After gathering such insights, you can find the most appropriate technical solutions. In this example, it would probably be the implementation of a live chat feature on your company website. Install it, test it and launch it. Wait a month or two and evaluate the median TrustPilot rating after the implementation of live chats and before. If this doesn’t improve your rating, move on to another area for improvement.

To sum up, great customer analysis always points to areas for improvement. After implementing solutions businesses can move forward and increase profitability.

Where does this all lead us to? If you spend more cash on doing customer analysis and do it with a clear plan, you’re bound to uncover more success both short and long-term. It’s all about customer satisfaction and analysis does help improve figures in that area dramatically.

If you pair good customer analytics and understanding audiences with talented creative, good graphic designers and neat technical innovations, you can boost pretty much every aspect of your business operation. Just take a look at this chart below to get a better understanding of what’s what.

So, after analyzing their clientele, your business will be able to do things more efficiently and actually spend less to achieve the same result. As we all know, it isn’t all about quantity. It’s always about quality. Even Aliexpress and IKEA know that if they would sell complete rubbish for pennies, nobody would buy, so they try to optimize economy-class quality with immense precision in terms of product placement and filling out every niche that their customers might look for. They’re able to do that because such companies spend a lot of cash on market research. They have entire companies working to carry out analytics and gather insights in order to optimize manufacturing, advertising, etc. You should do the same, only on a smaller scale.

Now it’s time to look at practical solutions and how customer analytics can work for the benefit of any organization. In this paragraph, we are going to list the most obvious methods of how analytics can bring a positive impact to your sales, prestige, brand awareness, etc.

If you have insights, put them to good use and create something more valuable to your clients/customers/subscribers, etc. By analyzing which of your product or service features are weakest, you can refine, revise, restructure or eliminate them altogether. On the other hand, you can know which, possibly overlooked features might deserve more attention.

It’s strange to see that we’re already in the third decade of the 21st century and far from every online or physical business is making the most from personalized ads. Some data sources claim that around 40% of all customers that switch providers or suppliers do that because of a lack of personalization. After understanding the behaviour and preferences of your audience, you can move forward and personalize a lot of aspects of your business (Example: make the web more likeable to females, who make 70% of your audience, translate and simultaneously deliver all ads in German because 1 of 3 buyers come from German-speaking countries, etc.).

When we talk about optimization, it’s usually to do with ad delivery and ad performance. Optimization is all about reducing spending for getting a click, a purchase, a subscription, etc. If you’re able to create good visual material and engaging ads, your business should definitely have low cost-per-click and great all-around ad metrics. Strive for that.

In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer went to a seminar about saving. The lecturer told him to squeeze every penny. Even though a comedy cartoon has not a lot to do with being a business owner, you should have the same mindset as the animated American. Leave no money on the table and make it work for you. Look to gather more data, even if it means more spending. If you’re able to use that data in the correct ways, the benefit will offset the costs multiple times.

Data can show you that customers are lacking trust or genuinely don’t view your business as someone they can honestly respect. Using data that you gathered, executives and PR firms can help find a way to boost perception and prestige, simultaneously working to increase profitability.

Churn is a huge pain. It’s something that no business wants, but will unavoidably have. Loyal customers are always your No.1 priority since they are the driving force behind almost all B2C and B2B organizations. Find what your audiences like & dislike to work on features and reduce churn.

If you still aren’t focusing your business resources on customer analysis - you’re making a big mistake. Either do it yourself or hire a specialist or a team to do it for you.

In general, the more customers you have, the more it’s going to cost you. Always use artificial intelligence-based audience analytics first. It’s going to be cheaper and quicker to gather the information that you can use as reference points. For example, you can run a special analytics script for a week to gather insights on 10 000 visitors while doing so through a questionnaire could take 10x more money and/or at least 5x the time. If you find something very intriguing with the help of AI tools, you can further invest in manual and more detailed analytics.

In general, customer analysis is a field related to marketing and customer relations. It has to do with the information about the demographics and behaviour of your customers which you gather throughout their interactions with your organization (e.g. site, visits to a branch, emails, calls). It is a must-do task for all businesses. It can separate profitability and prosperity from misery and losses. It has very versatile benefits and can bring value in many different ways. Make sure to select the right tools for the job, don’t shy away from spending on it and look to squeeze out every possible benefit along the way!