Winning a sale is just one part of an effective client relationship.
Nowadays, businesses are able to target ideal customers, track buying patterns, and improve customer retention using analytic data. But getting started with data tracking can be confusing. Many businesses are in the dark about why understanding lists of numbers can help improve their profitability.
The answer is simple: analytics show you where, how, and why your customers are finding you. Knowing how to interpret analytics can improve your business. Analytics give you insight into customer behavior, allowing you to fine-tune your marketing and boost sales.
Here are five ways to use analytics to grow your business and make every dollar of your marketing budget count.
1. Build a data-tracking framework
From Google Analytics to SEMrush, there is no shortage of programming available to help you deconstruct your online marketing. Customer relationship management software (CRM) can be paid or free. This depends on your budget and the level of insight you want into your customers.
Begin by determining what information you want to gather, and build a framework that supports your long-term goals. Looking to improve your click-through rates? Analyze web traffic and time spent on pages. Hoping to boost customer satisfaction? Automate surveys and feedback forms, then track open rates and catalog responses.
2. Quantify your ROI
Knowing which marketing efforts are working and which are falling flat is a job for analytics.
Using different benchmarking techniques, analytics can help you keep your finger on the pulse of ad campaigns, discount codes, conversion rates, and much more.
Different from metrics, KPIs (key performance indicators) help you measure a specific goal or project over time. CRM suites like Salesforce or Keap can keep track of customer behavior in an online cloud format. This helps you monitor the progress of sales funnels and customer purchase history. At the same time you’ll be honing your approach and delivering effective results.
3. Analyze first touch/last touch
Discovering where customers are entering your sales funnel is crucial to building a marketing model that generates leads and closes the sale.
Analytics give you insight into ‘first touch, last touch’ data. This data specifically details where, when, and how customers found your website.
Want to know if your global ad campaign is picking up steam? Analytics can tell you where in the funnel a customer entered — by email blast, Facebook ad, or Google search. Looking to improve checkout rates? Analytics can report abandoned carts or product click-through rates, allowing you to generate timely follow-ups to incentivize a sale.
4. Use predictive analytics to boost sale
Having advanced data on your ideal customer helps you bull’s eye your target and place your marketing efforts where they’re most likely to be seen.
Unsure about where your customers are spending their time? Plug in a few data points and let analytics do the heavy lifting of locating your audience. By getting ahead of the curve and anticipating behavior patterns using algorithms, you can better guide your customers to your website and nudge them towards a specific action.
5. Invest in CRM software
CRM (customer relations management) software like Salesforce, Keap, Monday and Zoho all allow you to track and store client interactions in a global cloud database, making customer information available to anyone from anywhere in the world.
This form of consumer analytics allows you to observe patterns in conversion, average sales, and scale marketing efforts up or down depending on the way customers are interacting with your brand.
For example: if customers are mainly arriving at your site from a specific outbound location, Salesforce will be able to track this pattern. This is in order to gather user data and monitor bounce rates so you can improve retention.
At Goalpost Group, we help our clients break the cycle of bad marketing using strategy, structure, and killer content that drives sales and wins the day. Get in touch with a member of our team to learn more about how we can help transform your marketing.
