How to Conduct Customer Behavior Analysis: Top Tips for Beginners

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.

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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.