Make the most use of your consumer data

What is customer data?

Customer data is information that shows you how your customers use your services and products or how they interact with your business.  It is also referred to as customer lifecycle data, behavioural data, event data, analytics data or digital marketing data.

An example of customer data is “Sara viewed a skater dress on your site, added it to her cart and completed the purchase.” “melody clicked your ad on Facebook, viewed your landing page, entered her information and made a sales call with your team. This information helps you understand what your customers experience with your product.

The importance of collecting customer data

A lot of people are going on about customer data because it has so many uses. Here are some things you can do with customer data

• You can use it to measure your product-market fit. You can use the information you collect to see if your users come back to your product often. If your engagement retention cohorts are on the low side, then it means your users do return to your product as time goes and you have zero product-market fit. If it’s on the high side with customers returning weeks after signing up, then you have a product-market fit.
• Helps you understand your product funnel. You’ll gain more insights into your funnel metrics like new signups, you’ll understand your engagement rates like how many people watch your videos and understand monetization like the number of new signups you get each week. This helps you spot weaknesses in the funnel and fix them.
• Using personalized campaigns to grow your audience. This is one of the best kinds of marketing as you can use the customer data you collect to send very personalized messages or emails at scale. You can use the information on what a customer did or didn’t do on your website to customize their message so it converts more than generic email marketing.
• Gather targeted feedback. Talking to your customers ensures you are creating something they actually want. Most high performing companies have great communication with their customers and using customer data makes this more doable.
• You’ll be able to provide amazing customer service. When your customer service team knows what customers have been up to on your site, what their challenges are and what they need, they’re more equipped to provide better and faster support instead of wasting time trying to figure out the problem.

Where can customer data be used ?

There are multiple tools that help you use your customer data effectively. You can create automated emails based on customer behaviour, put together variate tests without deep technical skills or communicate instantly with your customers. Instead of using large suites like Oracle, a lot of companies now use niche tools to maximize the use of their customer data.

Challenges with more data.

As we gain easier access to customer data and tools that help us use them, there are also challenges that arise from this as well.

• There are a lot of tools available which makes choosing the right one tasking. Finding the right tool that meets your needs and is easy to use as a beginner takes some figuring out however there are sites that help you find the right tool like Staclkist and Accel.
• Inconsistencies with data. If you’re using different tools they tend to get cluttered as they are overloaded with data or duplicate events that have differing names. Businesses tend to track too much data and give them different names so it makes using data tools complicated.
• Pinpointing when to level up. It can be tough knowing the exact way to create a flexible and custom set up that allows for you grow in the future. These tools can give you the answers to marketing and product performance but fail to give answers to the right timing for setting up a relational database.

How to make the most of your data

Don’t worry about these challenges though, all through Monetization Academy, we’ll take a look at how to crush these challenges and make the best use of your data.

• You need to know your most important metrics and focus on that. This will help you decide what tools to use for measuring them.
• Think hard about what you are tracking. There’s no need to track everything. What you need to do is focus on tracking the questions you need answers to and what you need to track to get those answers. Be detailed in naming and tracking events so you stay consistent and ensure you only add properties or events when you need answers to new questions.
• Store data now. This will help you with answering questions later. From the early stages of your business, you need to store information using the tools at your disposal and when you grow and have questions that need specific answers, you can level up and get stronger tools using the same data you have stored.

Thanks to developments in technology. We can easily access and use customer data for a variety of business processes. However, it is important to plan beforehand so you don’t find yourself overwhelmed.