In our digital age, data has become the lifeblood for most businesses. Today, it’s essential to constantly collect and analyze customer data in order to optimize various aspects of your business. Data isn’t just for big businesses, either. From internal processes to external interactions with customers, any firm that wants to grow needs to look at what data it can collect and how it can be used. Your data is telling a story, but it’s up to you to listen to it.
So how do you do that and what can you do with it? Let’s take a closer look at some of the data points most businesses should monitor, as well as some of the ways data can be used to help fuel growth.
Data Goals
Before any data are collected or analyzed, it’s important to set goals for collecting and using data. For example, you might want to develop a more complete profile of your customers in order to better target your marketing. Or you might want to improve your fulfillment processes, which requires an entirely different type of data. Setting goals for data collection and analysis will inform what data you collect, how you collect it, and what you do with it.
Data Collection
The next step a business must take is to understand what specific data it needs, what it has access to, and what it needs to get access to. Some basic customer data points that every business should collect include:
- Contact or buyer name & title
- Industry
- Estimated company revenue
It’s also important to collect purchase data. This should include:
- Frequency of purchase
- Average order amount
- Buying preferences
- Customer satisfaction with products and service
- Payment method
- Shopping cart abandon rate
Another are of information that’s important is how your buyers are interacting with your website. Data points to collect include:
- Entry pages
- Exit pages
- Time on site
- On-site search terms
- Navigation patterns
Of course, these are just examples of data you might collect; there may be some specific aspects of your business that generate data and are unique to your firm.
Data Analysis
In order to get any use out of the data, you need to be able to analyze them, particularly as they relate to each other. Now, the challenge for most businesses is that these three types of data are often held in distinct systems, which sometimes share data but more often don’t. Your customer information might be held in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, their purchase data might be held in an e-commerce software or enterprise resource management (ERP) software, and your website data might be held in an analytics platform.
This is where a business intelligence tool will likely be helpful, if not turning to a professional data scientist to help set up your initial collection and analysis.
Credit Key Data
One of the cool things about Credit Key is that we provide our users with some interesting analytics that can also be used to give a clearer picture of how customers make purchase decisions. For example, we can help businesses segment their customers based on the size of their Credit Key credit lines, which can help target higher value customers in marketing initiatives.
This just scratches the surface of what Credit Key can do for a business. Contact us to see what other data we can help generate and how you can use them to grow your business.
