In the past few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about customer data and behavioural analytics, and there’s a reason for that. Behavioural analytics is more than just some marketing buzzword – it has become an essential part of a digital strategy, aimed at improving and maintaining your customer engagement, conversion and retention rates.
Before I go on with explaining more about the ways behavioural analytics can help you reach the next level of your marketing efforts, let’s talk a little bit more about the basics and how exactly this approach works.
What is behavioural analytics, anyway?
Behavioural analytics refers to using customer’s activity data to get more insights into the way customers behave and interact with your digital product. Thanks to this, your marketing, data & product teams can get meaningful insights about what your customers like and don’t like about your product. By using these insights, you can adjust your product, your strategy and your marketing efforts accordingly – to offer a better experience to your customers.
What makes behavioural data “a must”?
There are many answers to this question, but for now, we’ll stick to the biggest advantage of using behavioural analytics – truly understanding your customers. This is important on so many levels, yet many companies still undermine the importance of understanding their customers and how this impacts the future of the company.
Customers will change the way they interact with your product or service during different cycles of their customer journey. Being able to identify their specific actions, while getting really granular, will get you ahead and help you make sure that the next move you make is the right one.
How exactly can companies benefit from behavioural analytics?
Behavioural analytics tools offer many different ways in which companies can achieve their business & marketing objectives more efficiently. In this article, I’m going to explain the most important benefits of using the behavioural data approach.
1. Single view of the customer
It’s no secret that being a marketer requires working with a rather big number of different tools for different purposes. For example, smaller teams may use Mailchimp for their email marketing, Google Analytics for analysing website activity, and Facebook and Google Ads for acquiring new audiences. Larger teams may use more advanced solutions, such as Segment’s customer data infrastructure or Braze’s cross-channel customer engagement platform. Using these tools gives marketers massive insights about all their marketing efforts – albeit, in separate locations.
Unlike the multi-platform analysis approach, behavioural analytics tools provide marketers with insights in an integrated and centralized way, giving marketers the golden opportunity to view the customer journey entirely at once. Thanks to this, your team won’t waste precious time in trying to stick data from different sources, but rather have it all in one place.
Saving time isn’t the only benefit of having all the data in a single dashboard. It also enables marketers to make well-informed decisions because of their quick access to real-time data.
Another important thing to note here is that, in the whole manual process of tracking, processing and analysing data from multiple sources, it’s likely that mistakes can happen. But, when marketers have all the data available at once, it reduces the possibility of human error and prevents costs associated with it.
2. Detailed audience segmentation
Segmenting your audience is crucial for achieving the best results for your campaign objective. Without it, you’re not able to reach out to your target audience in the right way, and therefore you’re missing the chance to place your offer, product or service to the right people as well. As you can guess, this only results with a loss in many aspects, and not only financially.
As much as there are companies that are still behind implementing modern marketing technologies, there are also a lot that use tools that offer segmentation options, but not to the extent that their business requires.
For example, you work in the fitness apps industry and you have tens of thousands of subscribers. This number is rapidly growing and with it the need to use a tool that will match your company’s needs and goals. You decide to buy a tool that will help you execute the marketing strategy on the next level, and here’s the catch – the tool you choose offers a limited segmentation, and often excluding any sort of behavioural data.
As behavioural data comes more and more into play, segmenting your audience based on demographic traits simply isn’t enough. With modern behavioural analytics tools, you can track data from all kinds of sources, both online and offline, and later use it in creating truly dynamic audience segments, that are updated in real-time across your tech stack.
3. Reduced churn rates
Behavioural analytics tools aren’t doing any magic here, in a sense that it is YOU who will have to do the needed actions to stop your churn from going any higher. However, what behavioural analytics tool can do to help is telling you where exactly you should look to find out what you have been doing wrong.
Early on when working on the PixFood project, we encounter serious issues with the churn rate of our newly acquired users. We had no idea what was causing this until we did an in-depth analysis using Mixpanel’s behavioural analytics tool. We were then able to pinpoint that the high churn rate was being caused by our, kind boring, onboarding tutorial.
Powered with the insight we got, we completely redesigned the onboarding scenario, which resulted with an increase of almost 15% in the number of accounts created, and an increase of 30% in our retention rates!
With the help of a behavioural analytics tool, you will be able to come up with an analysis, in which the customer pain points will be highlighted, and therefore provide all needed insights to your team to help prevent churn rates from growing.
4. Better understanding of ROI
Proving the ROI has been one of the top challenges of marketers in the past few years. Traditional marketing tools don’t have the option to dig too deep to find the data needed to calculate ROI and this mostly happens because many tools don’t offer the possibility to segment your audience based on behavioural data.
Modern behavioural analytics tools offer the option to see all types of ROI data in a detailed manner, starting from all KPIs associated results (e.g. conversions and average revenue per conversion) to comparing the results from different ads coming from different platforms (e.g. comparing the results from both your Facebook and LinkedIn ads).
Being able to see ROI in real-time is an amazing benefit for marketers because it will help them see how their budget is spent on many different levels, and based on this to establish a rather predictive approach in their next steps. When done properly, this can result in great success, which will make proving ROI in front of C-level executives or your clients, way, way easier.
5. Custom reporting
Reporting is an important part of letting the client or your manager know what marketing activities were happening on in a predefined time frame and what kind of results they’ve produced. However, as with many other aspects of marketing, there isn’t a one-fits-all approach to reporting as well – and there shouldn’t be.
With behavioural analytics tools, you can create different reports including different metrics, objectives and results, depending on the purpose of the report. For example, your client may only want to know how many leads the latest marketing activities produced and for what cost, while your manager might be interested in a more detailed report which will also include all other KPIs such as clicks, time spent on a page, post-click activity, and more.
While this feature isn’t exactly ground-breaking and new, these tools still have a certain finesse, making it ahead of traditional reporting. Another great benefit here is that the reporting process can be automated, leaving marketers with more time to focus on more value-adding activities.
Takeaway
The most important goal of using a behavioural data-based approach is to truly understand your customers, as this is the only way you can build a highly-successful strategy and a brand known for respecting and knowing what the customers really want and need.
In a time where customers are constantly bombarded with ads and promotions and offers, it’s important to remain true to the cause and make sure that you, as a brand, know how to stand out of the crowd. The only way you can achieve this is to make great use of the data you have, and this can be possible if you have the right tool by your side.
However, it is also extremely important to note that the only thing worse than not having the right tool for your business, is to have it without a team that will know how to make the best use of the tool. Lacking the experience and the knowledge for working with behavioural data can be costly, so make sure to have a team by your side that will know how to realize your goals.
At Alite International, we specialize in using data and technology to deliver human-centric experiences across the digital landscape. If you want to know how we can help you achieve the results you want with behavioural data, feel free to reach out and drop me a line at kristijan.arsov@alite-international.com – I’ll be happy to help! 🙂
