How to Conduct Customer Behavior Analysis: Top Tips for Beginners

MHC Team      December 4th, 2020 

Customer Behavior Analysis Illustration

Do you ever feel like you’re guessing what your customers want? Does your marketing team throw ideas out, hoping something strikes a chord with your customers and improves sales? Do you wish there was a formula that could tell you just what it is your customers want?

If this sounds familiar, you’re in luck! There is such a formula, and it’s called customer behavior analysis. Read on to learn about this technique and how you can use it to get reliably improved results.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS?

Customer behavior analysis is the process of looking at how your customers act through your buying process as seen through both a qualitative and quantitative lens. In essence, you’re creating a number of representative sample customers and mapping their journey.

The analysis can help your company better connect with and serve your customers. You’ll come out of it with a better understanding of who your customers are and what they want. You can also get some insight into how your customers really feel about your company and how to better reposition yourself.

Find out more about Customer Journey Mapping

Benefits of Customer Behavior Analysis

One of the biggest benefits of customer behavior analysis is that it allows you to customize content to your customers. In our modern sea of advertisements, customers want to feel the content they see is tailored to their needs. Analyzing the behavior of your customers can help you anticipate those needs and meet them in your marketing.

It can also help you attract and retain higher-quality customers. Your analysis can show you which customers will be worth more to your company and so are worth investing time and effort on. Then it can show you how to keep those customers coming back for more.

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How To Conduct a Customer Behavior Analysis

Here are the 5 main steps of building a high-quality analysis of your customer base:

1. Segment Your Customers

The first step to conducting customer behavior analysis is to segment your customer base. Start with basic divisions – gender, age, geographic location, and other basic demographic information.

But also make sure you divide your customers up by web activity, email open rate, online shopping frequency, and other such data.

You also need to segment your customers by who has spent the most money with your company. Start looking for patterns in these divisions – maybe most of your top-value customers are women or are between the ages of 35 and 50 or live in Yonkers. These divisions will become your archetypal customer personas, broad-stroke sample customers who represent each of these groups.

2. Identify Key Benefits

Once your customer behavior analysis relays your customer personas, it’s time to identify the key benefits for each persona.

Each customer persona has a reason they chose to spend their hard-earned money with your company. It’s up to you to figure out that reason and use it to help your future marketing efforts.

Take a look at what each customer bought most frequently and how much they spent. Was the purchase an impulse buy thanks to a sale or a window display?

How urgent was the purchase, and how long did this customer engage with your company through digital marketing channels before making a purchase?

3. Gather Quantitative Data

Now that you’ve got your qualitative data – the information from these last two steps – in place, you’ll need to turn your attention to the quantitative data in your customer behavior analysis. This data should be hard numbers about the customer personas you created and how they spend money in your industry. It’s important that you pull data from both internal and external sources to get an accurate picture of these personas.

Look at how these customers engage with social media, both on your company’s profile and in general. Check consumer reviews and analytics from any of your competitors. Also, take a look at broad-stroke customer statistics about how often this persona spends money in your industry and how much they spend.

Discover 6 Effective Ways to Collect CX Data

4. Create Your Customer Map

Armed with your customer personas and the quantitative data that describes them, it will be time to create your customer map. During this process, you will walk a mile in your customers’ shoes, following their path from discovering your company to making a purchase. This will give you a better idea of what keeps customers engaged and what causes them to bail on the process.

Look for common threads in each persona’s data sets – did they visit your site a certain number of times before making a purchase? Did certain groups all seem to stop engaging at a specific stage, and does your quantitative data give you insight into that loss? Pay special attention to your high-value customer personas and what patterns show up in their buying behaviors.

5. Test Your Work

Once you’ve mapped out your customer journey, you should have a few good ideas about how to improve it. If customers bailed at a certain point, you can figure out the pain point there and work to address it. If there were certain techniques that seemed to work well, you can incorporate more of those into your new marketing strategy.

After you put your new strategies into practice, you need to monitor the results and see if things are working. If your numbers are on the rise, keep doing what you’re doing and hone your strategy as you go. If your numbers don’t change or drop, go back to your analysis and use the new data to refine your approach.

Learn More About Customer Behavior Analysis

Customer behavior analysis can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal to grow your bottom line. This technique can give you solid insight into your customers, their needs, and their priorities. From there, you can tailor your customer journey to meet those needs and keep high-value customers coming back.

If you’d like help engaging your customers, check out the rest of our site at MHC. We can help you keep your customers connected, happy, engaged, and spending the easy way. Request a demo today and discover the smart, modern solution for a better customer experience.

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