How to become more customer-centric with customer analytics

Customer analytics is the key to transforming from product-centric marketing and customer-centric marketing. Customers are no longer making purchasing decisions based on a product, they are making them based on their purchasing experience. Research shows that 72% of millennial customers do not spend money on products, they spend money on experiences.

Hence, it is important for marketers to shift from product-centric marketing to customer-centric marketing. The key to a successful transition is customer-centric analytics. In this blog post, I will explain why customer analytics is necessary to make this transition.

What do we mean by product-centric and customer-centric?

First, it is important to establish what we mean by customer-centric. Customer-centric marketing means creating marketing messages that resonate with your customers. It is a contrast to product-centric marketing where the message is all about explaining how the product is awesome, the way it benefits the customer and why they must own it. Customer-centric experience goes beyond the product to encapsulate the entire experience from a point of first contact to post-purchase. Compounding this service is omnichannel marketing, where customers use digital and physical channels to complete a sale and expect consistent, high-quality customer service across the board.

To accomplish this level of service, customer analytics is necessary because conventional analytics systems are not enough to get the job done. Conventional analytics is not suited to the job for several reasons. The customer journey happens across several channels both online and offline. Hence, marketers need an analytics platform that integrates data from different sources effortlessly. Certain tools like descriptive analytics, while useful are insufficient for marketers’ needs. Descriptive analytics can describe what happened in the past, but cannot predict what will happen.

How to use customer analytics to utilise customer-centric marketing

Customer analytics is the best tool for the job because it allows marketers to track and analyse the different ways (or different combinations of marketing channels) customers interact with an organisation. Marketers can identify the key points in a customer’s journey in relation to business goals. Customer journey analytics allows marketers to analyse data from the interactions of millions of customers.

One of the key components of customer-centric marketing is mapping out the customer journey. The customer journey spans across several channels like emails, social media and TV ads. Furthermore, each buyer has their own journey and will interact with the brand differently. Customer analytics allows marketers to map out the journey of all these individual customers and then highlight key points in the journey depending on any metric. For example, customer acquisition or repeat purchases.

These tools empower marketers with clear, precise data revealing points in the customer journey that make customers leave. If marketers want to accomplish certain goals like higher customer retention, they can survey the customer journey to discover why customers came back by comparing their journeys against those who did not return.

Customer analytics can predict journeys for customers – bolstered by the fact that machine learning technology is incorporated into the analytics platform, meaning it can study the journeys of millions of customers to predict the route of customers in the future. The information is invaluable in the hands of marketers. They can use the information to experiment with new marketing funnels. With these tools, marketers can find the best ways to optimise their marketing funnel to find out what will work and what won’t, making it a vital tool for most industries.

Marketers have to answer several complex questions and customer analytics can help them get answers to these questions. How to add value for each customer? What percentage of customers take a certain path? Which customers take a certain path? These questions can be answered through data analytics.

Shifting from product-centric to customer-centric

A customer-centric journey is crucial for many brands to survive. However, the insight needed to provide a customer-focused journey can only be found in customer analytics. Analytics is necessary for marketing to contribute substantially to sales. Marketers can measure sales against KPIs and measure customer interaction in real-time. If marketers use customer analytics properly, this will lead to a more loyal following for brands, which guarantees healthy sales for years to come.