Consumer insight is used by marketers to find patterns and trends in their customers’ purchasing habits and discover precisely what is important to them, with the aim of using the findings to improve the effectiveness of campaigns. This type of data analysis is becoming more and more integral to the marketing strategies of many organizations as they look to improve declining results from direct marketing. In fact, our Data Deadlock report found that 86% of today’s marketers believe that they need to collect as much information as they can on their customers, showing that the majority are focused on gaining insights-driven solutions.
In the past, marketers could conduct surveys to gain insight into who was purchasing their products. However, with consumers using an increasingly wide array of purchasing channels, and awareness coming from seemingly endless social and digital sources, marketers now collect vast quantities of data in order to target and communicate with them most effectively.
How do we define consumer insight?
We can define consumer insight in a number of ways, but the foundation of it is identifying patterns in buying behavior, analyzing the customer journey steps and improving knowledge about customers and their profile to be able to use segmentation effectively.
Consumer insight provides answers to questions such as “Who are my best customers? Who's likely to churn? How and when will they buy again? Which campaigns and channels are working best? What is the best audience for my campaign?”
The most effective use of consumer insight is when it informs you of something new that is potentially actionable by your marketing team. Real insights are rarely derived from one source and therefore require extensive consolidation, matching and cleansing of datasets. Consumer insight is not particularly valuable if it isn’t acted upon and doesn’t generate any commercial value.
Spotify’s 2018 Goals – How consumer insight can be used
Music streaming giant Spotify has long been using customer data to enhance its services. The recommended playlists that pop up on the interface? It probably comes as no surprise that they use consumer data insights and predictive algorithms to create this highly tailored customer experience.
At the end of 2017 Spotify launched a new personalized microsite that presented its listeners with access to their own personal data, showing them their listening habits, top tracks, and other insights. These individual microsites give evidence to how Spotify use consumer data to truly understand each one of their customers and keep them coming back for more. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that Spotify has such a fantastic customer retention rate and a churn rate that is continuously declining. In 2016 they had 48 million subscribers and a 6.6% churn rate, whereas in 2017 they grew to 71 million subscribers and had a decreased churn rate of 5.5%.
With the rise of competing streaming services over the years, Spotify turned to consumer insights to maintain market dominance and from these statistics it seems it’s a great example of the success that consumer insight can give.
How to gain customer insight
As marketers we’re all acquiring customer data (and lots of it), but it is only truly useful once you have gained insight from it. Therefore, the most effective methods of gaining actionable consumer insight include:
- Data Analytics – Analytics platforms and BI tools can offer a great deal of information. They provide data visualisations that allow marketers to analyze data through charts that enable patterns in customer behavior to appear.
- Segmentation - Segmenting your customers often requires enhancements and standardization of data to make it truly insightful. However, it allows you to divide customers up based on age, marital status, location, channel behavior etc. This means you can create highly targeted messages that have better relevance and personalization.
- Deduplication of data – Although a boring part of the process of consumer insights, it’s probably the most important – and difficult. This is the process of merging records for customers that are the same to avoid communicating the same message to them multiple times. E.g. Merging ‘A Smith’, ‘Andrew Smith’ and ‘Andy Smith’ by using identifiers in your database such as email, postal code, and telephone numbers.
- Establishing a Single Customer View – Described by some as the “Holy Grail of marketing” a Single Customer View unifies all your data and does the deduplication, standardization, cleansing and optimization. This ensures that the data you derive your insights from is trustworthy.
BlueVenn – Your customer insights solution
BlueVenn is a powerful customer insight tool that ticks all the boxes for marketers that need to gain more insights from their data – and act on the insights.
The BlueVenn Single Customer View takes the pain away from data cleansing and preparation by unifying and deduplicating all the data sources within the business. Then through a myriad of customer insight and data visualisation tools, it enables marketers to quickly analyse and segment their customers. Finally, with the built-in customer journey planner, marketers can act on their insights and segments by dragging into workflows that will execute campaigns by integrating with other marketing execution systems.
Book your BlueVenn demo today
To discover more about how BlueVenn uses your data to provide you with unparalleled customer insight, contact our team today to book a demo.
