Picture this: You and your BFF just hit the highway to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Six hours into your road trip, you spot an old-school sign for a fortune teller. Grabbing life by the horns, you decide to park the car and pay the clairvoyant a visit.
An older woman with long, dark hair greets you at the door. She leads you to a dimly lit room behind a velvet curtain. After sitting at the rickety table, the woman pulls out a deck of tarot cards. She suddenly addresses you by your first name, though you swear you never told it to her. The fortune teller reveals items about you that you haven’t come to realize yourself yet. You’ve never felt so truly seen by someone—especially a stranger.
Despite the rest of your summer road trip being noteworthy, you never forget your connection with that fortune teller.
At their core, every person wants to feel seen and understood, and it’s now an expectation that companies understand their consumers just as well as they understand themselves. Like fortune tellers, brands that leverage customer behavioral analysis can build strong connections with buyers, even new ones. By showing consumers you really “get” them, your brand can deepen loyalty, boost retention, and drive sales. And you can do all of this through behavioral analysis. Get ready to build better customer connections for a more prosperous and bright future.
What is Customer Behavioral Analysis?
Whether you use email outreach or social media to connect with new customers, you should always use hyper-targeted messaging. Customer behavioral analysis ensures you always engage customers with relevant, personalized content.
In fact, personalization is the number one method used by email marketers and sales teams to drive engagement.
Additionally, about 20% of marketers reported that personalization improves engagement. From customized email subject lines to curated product recommendations, consumers looove content tailored to them.
Customer behavioral analysis comprehensively investigates how new and current customers interact with your brand across their buying journey. This process reveals insights into valuable variables that influence your customers and their priorities, motives, and decisions. You can even use these behaviors to predict how your future audiences will behave.
According to Salesforce, over 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs and wants. With the consumer data tracking technology available to companies, creating a personalized buyer journey is now easier than ever, especially in the United States, where rules and regulations surrounding customer information are less strict than somewhere like Europe.
Brands that use behavioral analysis as part of their sales prospecting techniques can develop a better understanding of their customer’s expectations and desires. This also increases the desired outcomes of marketing and sales. Behavioral analysis helps brands build deeper connections with customers unaware of your existing offerings, so potential customers already feel a tie and connection to the brand and their sales representative by the time they reach the decision stage of the buyer journey.
What Does Data Have to Do with It?
Want to generate viable sales leads, boost engagement, and attract more customers? Better yet, do you want a glimpse into the future? Efficient customer behavioral analysis processes will help.
Data in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform will make or break your results. Thanks to “cookies,” marketing automation tools that are integrated into your CRM continuously capture customer behavioral data across websites, apps, and more.
However, your CRM can quickly become clogged with low-quality data.
While behavioral data is most effective when plentiful, dirty data is a problem. 37% of people change their email addresses every year, and it can be challenging for companies to keep up. That’s why quarterly cleaning of your CRM is crucial. If needed, grab help from a contact database with real-time verified data. Not only will you get access to correct data, but your data will also be enriched with additional information like business data, job titles, professional and personal emails, and phone numbers that you did not previously have access to. If you know your contact information is accurate, you don’t have to worry about key decision-makers missing your messages.
Predict Future Customer Behavior by Focusing on These Essential Data Points
Now that you’ve spruced up your CRM, you can focus on other vital data points that can predict future customer behaviors, like a true fortune teller. You can use this data to scale campaigns and create more “clickable” and actionable content if correctly interpreted—on both the marketing and sales side.
A few key data points to keep tabs on throughout your behavioral analysis include:
Nature of the purchase: Is the customer a habitual spender or an impulse buyer? Understanding these purchasing patterns helps you better predict how customers will respond to upcoming marketing campaigns.
Demographics: A data point you should continuously be tracking. Demographics include income, location, age, gender, and other essential customer characteristics.
Churn rates: When a customer discontinues doing business with a brand and can predict the probability of someone canceling or failing to renew their subscription.
Preferred channels: Do your customers love certain social platforms? Or do they prefer emails? Understanding your customers’ preferred platform allows you to meet them where they already are.
A/B experimentation interaction: Like your high school science experiments, test one factor at a time when sending out emails and sales sequences or launching social ads. Begin to analyze what messaging, layouts, and imagery your audience reacts to the most, and keep doing it.
Number of touchpoints: Some buyers are more decisive than others. Some prospects never become customers at all. Watch your potential customers’ touchpoints and see how many are needed before they convert. Then, find commonalities among them. What do the buyers with five touch points before purchase have in common? What traits do the buyers who had fifteen touch points before purchase share? It could be the number of decision-makers or the company’s overall budget.
Determining your prospects and current buyers’ behavior can better help you segment your audiences and the strategies you use to target each one.
Identifying Customer Behavioral Analysis Benchmarks and KPIs for Yourself
Setting your benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) is just as important as knowing what data to track. After implementing several campaigns, analyze metrics like acquisition costs, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value to determine overall campaign effectiveness.
Some of the most crucial customer behavioral KPIs to track include:
Depth and breadth of adoption: Reveal how widely your product is adopted and how customers interact and behave within the product. This metric is shown in how many company users are assigned and actively using one account. The more your platform is used (both by the number of people and the consistency of use), the higher the possibility of customer retention.
Time-to-value: The time it takes for new customers to realize your brand’s value and benefit from your offerings. It turbocharges your trial-to-paid conversion rates, as well as your revenue. The quicker your customer realizes the value of your product, the better. The longer your product or service takes to solve a pain point, the lower the customer satisfaction rates.
Free users to paid plans: Lastly, you should closely monitor your freemium to premium conversion rate. This is the rate at which free users upgrade to paid subscribers. You can then analyze and survey which products turned them into paid subscribers and put more sales, marketing, and product development focuses there.
Knowing When to Nurture a Lead and When to Back Off
Have you seen an uptick in your KPIs since implementing customer behavioral analysis? Good!
However, your work isn’t finished yet.
Let’s loop back to our wise fortune teller again. We forgot to mention the part of the story where she lets you and your bestie walk out the door rather than trying to sell you an aura-cleansing service. Sure, she knew your worst fears and deepest desires. But she also knew when to let you go.
The same can be said for brands. Even after building new customer connections, you need to know when to nurture leads and when to back off.
While writing one follow-up email after no response is an excellent way to nurture leads, you don’t want to waste too much time chasing those who are uninterested.
Based on your behavioral data, you should stop nurturing leads who:
- Don’t fit into your ideal customer demographics
- Aren’t engaging with your brand
- Have stopped doing business with your company (depending on the reason)
- Do not need—nor want—your products or services
Your Future Looks Bright
Understanding your customers’ and potential customers’ expectations and needs allows you to craft highly personalized content that can deepen trust, improve the customer experience, and drive revenue.
Brands that leverage behavioral analytics and clean CRM data see clearer connections between segmentation within their CRM. This will enable marketing and sales teams to craft messaging and strategies that will increase conversions and turn leads into customers faster.
With behavioral analysis you can enjoy a bright, profitable future.
