Valuable data collection methods for customer research

If your business is now making an effort be more customer-focused, it means you are switching to adopt the idea of a customer-centric culture. Now, you will be refocusing your business model on the customers’ behavioral patterns.

In contrast, you should know that many companies today are missing out on valuable data that they could be collecting and analyzing for improved performance.

As explained by an article in the Harvard Business Review, marketers are now allocating 57% of their current budgets to focus on digital marketing projects, and in 2023, they plan to boost spending by 16%. But about 30% of marketers responding to a survey have indicated that they are receiving average to zero returns on their marketing investments. This underscores the importance of partnering with data collection and analysis professionals, such as the team at Lytics.

You don’t want to make the same mistake, missing out on data that could boost your bottom line and increase the number of satisfied, loyal customers.

Types of customer data to collect

As a business that wants to step up its marketing performance, you will want to give serious thought to the kinds of information it would be best to start collecting, and why. Here’s an overview the valuable types of customer data that your organization can consider gathering today:

Basic/essential data

You can obtain a great deal of basic and essential information using such tools as website forms and surveys, which interested visitors will fill out in hopes of getting more targeted marketing to their specific needs. You can also get their details via email signups. If you offer a loyalty program (you really should consider one if one isn’t in place now), you can obtain clear signs of customer interest as you collect the details to sign them up.

Interaction/engagement data

Tracking interaction and those all-important engagement benchmarks is essential for seeing if your marketing is on track and resonating with your target demographics. Reward programs with a customer loyalty program, as mentioned above, are an ideal way of getting more stickiness with these individuals.

Naturally, these efforts will involve your social medial channels to a large degree. Stay active, listening and commenting and responding to customers when they praise or criticize your products, services and the entire experience of customer service itself. Measure engagement in various ways, such as how long they watch a YouTube video about your company (embedded on site or at your YouTube channel). Does a visitor look at every single product category page on your site, or just look at a page about color options and then flee? This is all great information to consider.

Behavioral data

Tracking and monitoring and then interpreting the past behavior of your customers is invaluable. It help you match their interests and proclivities to the kinds of products or other offerings you have. A customer may be a person, another business, or an agent working on behalf of a particular organization interested in procuring items from you.

You’ll obtain more information depending on whether they person is signed in or if they are anonymous, but both kinds of information can be useful as you figure out what most people currently want as they visit your site.

Attitudinal/preferential data

As you look into using attitudinal and preferential data to get to the true heart of what your customers are after, you’ll be faced with quantitative data, which is easy to structure as well as segment into different consumer categories, and then it’s ready for your team to analyze. It includes details such as how often a person visits a website, or filled out a form, or how many purchases this person has made in the last month or year.

On the other hand, qualitative data can show you things such as a drop in performance by 15% of people filling out forms. It can reveal problems with your website’s user interface, or the nature of the prompts you’ve been sending out via social media messaging or email blasts. Either way, when numbers start to change, they signal to your marketing team that something has changed in the consumers’ minds or in the way you are doing outreach to them.

Methods of collecting customer data

When considering the various methods you can use to obtain fresh information from your valuable customers, remember that you are embarking on this project because it’s important to get as much first-party data as possible. It will be the most valuable information you can use. Here are the proven methods for customer data acquisition to keep top of mind:

Account registration

The customers are giving you a treasure trove of information, ranging from their contact details and location, and what they are hoping to get from you in terms of products, services and what kind of spending options they prefer. You might offer them a subscription package or let them buy from you on a month-to-month basis, for example, and this information will help inform your operational budget.

Website tracking

Examine what pages your visitors are checking out and how long they spend on a page. Do they click links to learn more, or are they going back to the home page to browse some more?

Transactional data

What kind of interaction are you getting from visitors to the site? Monitor and measure what they are actually purchasing, capturing this transactional data at the point of sale.

Forms and surveys

Each survey your visitors fill out will give you valuable details about their preferences. This helps you make recommendations on a personal basis, through email messages, and with offerings of coupons and other benefits.

Email

Keep track of what email messages a customer clicks on and which ones they ignore and delete. If a customer clicks a link to a sale, you have a lot of good data on what motivates them. And if an individual forwards one of your marketing messages to a friend, it’s a strong endorsement that you’ll want to make note of, as well as cater to this new referral.

Social media

Pay attention to what people are saying about you and to you on social media channels. Not only should you make a concerted effort to rely, especially when they make a criticism or have a question, but also when they praise you to others. Track this data to measure online engagement in different social channels. You might discover that you need to spend more time on Facebook or Twitter, while Instagram posts are pulling in plenty of useful data so far.

Managing data for customer research

You’ll want to make sure that your whole team knows about and is following best practices for data management and analysis.

A good way to get them started is by working with a customer data platform, such as the versatile and robust system developed by the team at Lytics. It drastically simplifies the entire marketing process, thanks to personalized data that it captures and then analyzes. Marketing departments can leverage this platform so they can focus more on their outreach efforts, confident that they have the data and analysis to improve customer relationships as they guide people through the sales journey. This is all better accomplished when you have high-quality data, especially from sources such as email, transactional reports, customer surveys and comments on social channels.