Do you ever feel disconnected from your customers? Or maybe you feel lost in a world of more potent competitors, and despite your best efforts, you simply can’t unlock growth for yourself and your business? If that’s the case, and you also ran out of ways to improve your marketing strategies and speak to potential customers, it means you need another newer, more advanced, and more lucrative approach. Enter Customer Behavior Analysis: the science of understanding what goes on your customers’ heads – then responding to it.
Humans aren’t just numbers inside a report. Your customer’s desires can’t be translated into transactional KPIs.
Humans are illogical beings who make seemingly arbitrary decisions.
And it’s your job to decode the emotions and processes behind these buying decisions.
You do this by conducting thorough customer analysis and applying your findings to boost your revenue and improve the overall customer lifetime value.
In today’s article, we’ll take a look at the methodology of Customer Behavior Analytics and how to apply it.
In the long term, conducting customer behavior analysis and using behavioral data can lead to smarter customer acquisition, better customer experience, and improved customer retention.
Key Takeaways
- Definition of Customer Behavior Analysis: It involves studying how customers make purchasing decisions regarding products or services, providing insights into their preferences and motivations.
- Beyond Basic Metrics: Effective analysis goes beyond simple demographics and web traffic; it delves into understanding why customers choose your business, what retains them, and the reasons behind churn.
- Influencing Factors: Three main elements affect customer behavior: personal factors (individual preferences), psychological factors (perceptions and attitudes), and social factors (influences from family and friends).
- Benefits of Analysis: Conducting thorough customer behavior analysis leads to smarter customer acquisition, enhanced customer experience, and improved retention rates.
- Implementation Steps: To conduct an effective analysis, identify customer segments, gather qualitative and quantitative data, analyze purchasing patterns, and apply findings to tailor marketing strategies and improve customer engagement.
What Is a Customer Behavior Analysis?
Customer Behavior Analysis represents the study of how people make buying decisions concerning a product, service, and /or organization.
The results of a Behavior analysis provide the insights you need about your ideal customer profile and empower you to create effective strategies for your eCommerce business.
Customer Behavior Analysis allows you to stay on top of your eCommerce game in a world that offers infinite possibilities and options for consumers.
How to Conduct a Customer Behavior Analysis
Customer Behavior Analysis should go further than analyzing shop behavior, monitoring monthly active users, or simply looking at the raw demographic data you can collect about your customers (such as age, location, gender, etc.).
Instead, to truly reap the benefits brought by looking at the behavioral data. In that case, you should go deeper with your analysis and identify the answer to a couple of essential questions:
Why did customers choose me in the first place?
What keeps them coming back?
What makes them churn?
It’s all about the voice of the customer.
Listening to it is the first step in becoming and staying relevant in today’s extremely competitive environment and, often, over-saturated market.
Before beginning your Analysis, you must understand the three elements influencing customer behavior.
You can’t influence these factors, but you can keep them in mind when designing specific customer journeys and behavioral segmentation.
Customer Personality
Your customer base consists of different people, all of which are as complex as they come.
Some will be impatient and choleric, while others will be respectful and calm. Some will be somewhere in the between or exhibit entirely different personality traits.
Analyzing customers’ interactions with your brand and asking for regular feedback will help you understand what type of people you attract and how you should interact with them as a business.
Psychological Triggers & Responses
While your products and services address the same need, consumers verbalize that need differently.
Understanding your customers and what triggers them helps you facilitate long-term customer relationships that are both lucrative and relevant.
If you feel stuck and you can’t seem to understand your customers – no matter how hard you’re trying, you might want to check out the Jobs-to-be-done framework, designed by Bob Moesta.
It’s an excellent tool to pinpoint your customer’s motivations, needs, fears, and desires and why they might fire you (churn).
You can apply this and use interviews to determine what disrupts customers’ routines and makes them buy from you.
How you package and market your products should respond to your findings during this stage.
Read this Ultimate Guide on JTBD interviews and discover how to use this methodology as a source of a deeper understanding of your customers and your business.
Social Trends
Since humans are social creatures, they have this undeniable need to fit in and be part of a community.
Whether we talk about gardening, cooking, home decor, or other communities, each group of people comes with its own rules and trends.
Consider peer pressure, friendly recommendations, norms, or cultural trends as external factors influencing the customer’s decision to buy (or not buy) from you.
You need to be aware of trends and be prepared to respond to them with real-time marketing campaigns.
Now that we understand what affects customer behavior, it’s time to look at the necessary steps of a Customer Behavior Analysis.
Go even more in-depth knowledge about Consumer Behavior, with Omniconvert’s Introductory Course into Consumer Behavior. It’s a light and free course, meant to help you grasp the basics of Costumer Behavior and take the first steps towards customer-centricity.
Step 1 – Segmentation.
Customer segmentation is crucial at this stage because you want to create personalized acquisition and retention strategies.
However, few companies understand segmentation fundamentals and still apply one size fits all approaches in acquisition.
They go for quantity over quantity and end up overspending on acquisition while completely ignoring retention.
So, when segmenting your customer base, go beyond demographics or online behavior.
Look at each group’s recency, frequency, and monetary value and segment your customers according to the value they bring to your business.
This way, you can quickly identify the MVPs inside your customer base, the power customers, and the soulmates and prioritize their experiences.
Moreover, RFM Segmentation also shows you who are the customers at risk of churning, reveals bad-fit customers, and highlights new customers with high potential.
Step 2 – Identify the advantages each segment perceives.
In other words – why are they buying?
“The progress your users are trying to make is the same” – as Bob Moesta explains it.
This means your products are solving the same need, right?
However, your JTBD interviews reveal that your customers will use different languages to describe their needs. Laso, they will respond to triggers, even if the result is the same.
Your job in this step is to identify what your customers hope to achieve with your help.
What’s the main benefit each segment craves, and how do they verbalize it?
Step 3 – Analyze quantitative data.
Quantitative data is measured in numerical values.
How many new clients you acquired, the average time they spend on your website, the number of cart abandoners, and the average days between transactions are all metrics you can follow.
Your zero and first-party data is the goldmine you’re sitting on – since it pinpoints precisely what your customers are doing.
In Step 3, you aggregate all your data into one place and interpret it with an analytical eye.
You’re looking for patterns and anomalies at this point. Then conclude according to what you’ve found.
Step 4 – Look at the qualitative data.
Unlike quantitative data, which is all about numbers, qualitative data is descriptive and cannot be measured.
Qualitative research is done through interviews or surveys with open-ended questions. It should enable your customers to tell you their true feelings without guidance.
When conducting interviews, try to select people from each customer group. This way, you get a complex view of your customer base instead of falling into the bias of only listening to power customers or unhappy customers.
Step 5 – Kick off a data-driven campaign based on the Analysis.
Avoid falling in love with your data or going down a research rabbit hole. Take actionable steps after the analysis and capitalize on your customer behavior data.
The insights you found through segmenting, pinpointing needs and wants, and conducting quantitative and qualitative research should reveal opportunities for our acquisition, retention, and nurturing campaigns.
It’s time to take advantage of these insights and personalize the customer experience.
Adapt your messaging, advertising channels, and campaign timing to each customer segment.
Eliminate roadblocks promptly and turn your customer experience department into a profit center.
Step 6 – Evaluate the results.
After applying your insights and changing your strategies, it’s time to analyze the results.
Remember that the testing period can vary according to the changes you’ve made. If you only created a new set of creatives and rolled them out in your Ad campaigns, you should see the results quickly.
However, if you make enterprise-level changes, you might have to wait a while to reap the benefits.
Look at metrics like conversion rate, CAC, or CLV to determine the effect of your updated campaigns.
Of course, monitoring the results is an ongoing process. eCommerce is fast-paced. New players will sprout monthly (if not daily), and cultural shifts are always happening.
So it would be best if you revisited your Analysis as frequently as possible to ensure you’re constantly updated with what’s happening inside your customers’ minds.
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Importance of Customer Behavior Analysis
Right now, buyers have hundreds (if not more ) of options to choose from when they want to satisfy their needs, fulfill a desire, or move their lives forward.
So, if you want to reach their hearts (and their wallets), you need to understand consumers’ behavior and develop relevant acquisition campaigns.
Competition is fierce; costs are surging, and more and more people are opting out of having their cookies tracked—all good reasons to get back to basics and use your customer data wisely.
Another benefit of customer behavior analytics is that it allows you to pre-qualify your leads – right from the acquisition stage.
Your products or services aren’t built for everyone, and that’s ok. There’s no harm in filtering your audience.
Instead of trying to win everyone and get as many new customers as possible, analyzing customer behaviors empowers you to acquire customers with profitable lifetime potential.
You know – those customers every eCommerce business dreams of: they buy frequently, spend a lot of money on your brand, and recommend you to their peers.
These customers don’t come by chance.
There are complex data-driven decisions behind the acquisition and retention campaigns. Before making these decisions, marketers and sales departments need to analyze customer data and behavior.
If done right, customer behavior analysis provides insights that help you:
- Identify common problems (or improvement opportunities)
Quantitative research reveals anomalies in your customer data. If you look at these anomalies, you will notice patterns:
- Customers churning from a particular geographic location
- Customers churning after ordering a specific product
- Customers churning after a certain number of interactions
Pair it with qualitative research, interview your customers, and you find out about common issues that can be fixed.
For example, if customers are churning in a specific location, you might have a problem with your delivery services – products arrive too late, broken, or don’t arrive at all.
Knowing this, you can move further, switch your delivery partners, and improve customer retention in that area.
The same is applicable when it comes to reducing customer churn. You can eliminate the problem completely if you find the common reasons why customers leave you.
- Tailor the marketing strategies
Customers don’t randomly buy (or switch) a product. Either something disrupts their routine, or they find a better option.
By understanding the progress your clients are after, you can adapt your marketing strategy to become more relevant and attractive to other potential customers.
- Optimize messaging – content & timing
Customer data like buying frequency and recency allows you to predict when a customer will buy again.
So you can plan your upsell campaigns to the exact moment a customer will need from you again. No one wants to stack products. They want to use them and move on.
Meet this need by sending the right message, at the right time, to the right customer segment.
- Increase customer satisfaction
Behind every thriving eComm business, there is a happy customer.
If you feel disconnected from your customers and lost in providing excellent customer service & experience, behavioral data is here to help.
However, if you figure out how customers perceive your brand (and the interaction with it), you can identify your weak spots and solve them.
This way you can decrease churn and even gain more market share, once word-of-mouth advertising starts getting around.
- Increase conversion rates
Customer behavior data reveal essential information, such as preferred channels, triggers, and brands.
Align your marketing decisions with the truth behind your data, and you avoid promoting unfit products on the wrong channels. Just because Tik Tok is trendy, it doesn’t mean your audience is necessarily present there.
The beauty of customer data is that you stop relying on gut feelings or trends to drive sales. You hit the bull’s eye with intelligent decisions based on your data.
- Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV is the game changer in eCommerce. Businesses slowly realize that relying on traffic and acquisition isn’t feasible anymore.
Consumers have different buying habits and expect you to meet their needs in real-time.
It’s your responsibility to meet these needs with customer journey mapping. You have to analyze your data and identify your customers’ purchase patterns.
Then segment all customers into multiple customer bases and create a unique customer journey for each segment.
Meet the needs, solve problems, and prioritize high-value customers; these are the main pillars of CLV, and customer behavior analysis lies right in the middle of it all.
Wrap-up
Identifying types of customers have always been important. But today, it’s crucial to understand your customers:
- What triggers them to buy your products?
- What are they hoping to get with your products?
- What are they expecting from you?
Then come up right front and meet their expectations. It’s not about faking customer-centricity to get more sales.
It’s about aligning your entire business to the lifecycle marketing stage, having all your departments gravitate towards customer experience, and placing the customer first.
Remember – in 2022 and beyond, whoever brings more value wins. Wins the market share, the loyal customers, and the sustainable, predictable growth all eCommerce businesses crave.
Will you be the one to win?
Frequently Asked Questions about Customer Behavior Analysis
What is Costumer Behaviour analytics?
Customer Behavior Analysis represents the study of how people make buying decisions concerning a product, service, and /or organization.
What are the 4 types of customer buying behavior?
Extended decision making for expensive or luxury products; limited decision making for scarce products or products in short supply; habitual buying behavior for people looking for cheap products or always available; variety-seeking buying behavior for people looking to choose from many options.
How do you conduct a customer behavior analysis?
Segment your customers and identify the benefits sought by every segment. Analize quantitative and qualitative data you gathered on each segment, make data-driven decisions based on what you found out, then analyze the results.
How do you collect customer behavior data?
Track and store consumer behavior on your website, personal data you’re gathering in a purchase, ask customers for their data, conduct surveys and interviews, etc.
Why is customer behavior analysis important?
Customer behavior analysis is important because it helps businesses understand their customers’ needs, motivations, and preferences. By analyzing customer behavior, businesses can make data-driven decisions to improve marketing strategies, enhance customer experiences, optimize product offerings, and drive customer engagement and loyalty.
