What is Customer Data, and why is it important?
Customer data is the information you can collect about a user when they interact with your business. This can be across social media, website analytics, conversion events or even in-store interactions.
In the digital age, understanding your customers can feel like an impossible task. If you don’t have a physical presence in a community, business owners can fall into the trap of thinking all their customers are just names and numbers on a list. The truth is this couldn’t be more wrong.
Struggling to understand your customers? Thats because you need to understand the data.
Let’s start out from the top, Why is it important to know your customer?
Language:
Just like brick-and-mortar stores, understanding who visits your business is essential for planning your businesses future. If you run social media pages or closed customer groups, look at how your customers speak to you and each other.
If you own an online store that sells DIY equipment like hammers and nails, you might imagine that your average customer is a carpenter who knows what they want and when they want it. From looking at customer language, you might find out that your average customer is a parent looking to work on their home or a relative's house.
Understanding the distinction can be important when looking at stock and price points. What can the average customer afford? Am I clear enough in product descriptions? Do I explain precisely what this product does and how it applies to home use? Seeing how customers voice their opinion on your business can elevate frustration points and promote repeat purchases.
Feedback:
Feedback is often considered hostile, and sometimes abusive. Comments like these we have all seen on business pages in the ‘reviews' section.
The fact is Feedback doesn't just mean reviews; it's ongoing engagement with the business, its repeat customers, its website navigation... it's every way a customers journey is conducted.
Check Analytical data often; if you see customers getting lost, frequently bouncing off the site in seconds or getting 404 errors, you need to act on this. Look at how many people frequently buy from you, maybe reward them with a discount code they can share with their friends and family.
Remember, your customer data is unique to your business; harnessing it is the best way to grow.
Do you know what your customers want?
Now we know what customer data is, why it’s important and how we can use it; what different types of data can you collect?
Personal Data
The first kind of customer data you can collect is known as Personal. This is split into two different categories. First, you have PII (Personal Identifiable Information), and the second is Non-PII, which stands for Non-Personal Identifiable information.
If you're new to this, it might seem confusing, but think of it this way: if your business collects information such as a customer's physical address, location, name, age or anything else that could identify exactly who your shopper is, this is PII. But suppose your website visitor didn't checkout, and the only thing that identified them was an IP address or a device ID; this is No-PII. You can't identify who this shopper was.
Behavioural Data
While we have touched on this already, the following type of data you can collect is Behavioural.
For me, this type of data is critical. You can run the best ad campaigns in the world, but if the website isn’t clicking with customers, you are stuck. Behavioural data looks at how a customer interacts with your business, what web pages they often visit, where customers are finding value, and where they are struggling. All of this informs you of what improvements you can make to change your customer behaviour.
If you built your website on Shopify and link Google Analytics, all this information is easily accessible to you.
You might not see your customers in person, but understanding how they engage with your brand is just as important.
Engagement Data
This is the data I use daily as the head of marketing here at UNBXD. When building out marketing campaigns across various platforms, it's essential to see where customers are engaging.
This is a key area to watch as it's likely your most expansive sales funnel and will carry the majority of your web traffic.
Check daily to see what campaigns are clicking and what needs to be changed. Across most digital marketing platforms, this data is easy to see and digest.
I recommend linking all your social media platforms to Google Analytics & Databox to see it as a digestible daily metric. Compare your Engagement data to weeks prior; if it's down, what's changed? Maybe something you launched last week didn't perform as you expected. Don't be scared to fail and try something new.
Analysing and understanding this data will bring you higher sales and cost you less money in the long term.
Keep an eye on our blog in the coming weeks as we look at different ways you can use this data to bring you higher customer satisfaction and revenue. In the meantime, check out some of our successful marketing campaigns and web launches that were reliant on understanding and analysing customer data.
