Paying attention to your customers’ buying habits can pay off. Using customer analytics to track buyer behavior can boost your sales, customer satisfaction and customer retention by as much as 25 percent, Quantzig data shows. Studying your customers’ purchasing patterns is so effective because it enables you to tailor your marketing and sales tactics toward the preferences of your target market and even toward the habits of individual customers. Here are four strategies you can use to gain insight into your customer base’s purchasing habits:
Track Online Customers with Ecommerce Tracking
You can gather information about customers who make purchases through your website or app by using the Google Analytics ecommerce tracking feature. By adding a code to your site or app, you can send information about your buyers’ behavior to your Google Analytics account, where you can view the results and study patterns.
Ecommerce tracking comes in two varieties: standard and enhanced. Standard ecommerce tracking lets you follow buying activity on your website or app. You can track product information, transaction information, average order values, conversion rates, time taken to complete a transaction and other information. Enhanced tracking extends this functionality by also letting you track when customers add items to shopping carts, when they begin checkout, when they complete purchases and when they abandon your sales funnel.
Study Your Customers’ Social Media Habits
You can also track information about customers’ social media habits. One way to do this is to use the native analytics tools provided by individual social platforms. For instance, Facebook Audience Insights lets you cross-reference uploaded lists of customer emails and phone numbers with other publicly-available information about your customers. You can then analyze demographic trends among your customers, including age and gender, income level, spending methods, retail spending and online spending.
In addition to using individual social platforms’ analytics tools, you can also track information across all your social channels, says Marketo senior social media marketing manager Lisa Marcyes. Tools such as Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and Buffer can help you automate cross-platform tracking.
Track In-store Behavior
You can also apply analytics tools to tracking customers’ in-store behavior. Wi-Fi analytics tools let you capture information from customers who log into your Wi-Fi network, while beacon analytics tools let you capture information from customers who have your app installed on their smartphone. You can then collect information about your customers, their devices, their device locations and other valuable marketing and sales information.
You can also deploy your store’s security cam as a business surveillance camera by using it to track in-store shopping patterns. Use a high definition security camera system from a supplier such as Lorex to collect information such as how many customers enter your store, which of your displays receive the most traffic, which products get handled the most, and which products get placed back on the shelf.
Analyze Cross-Channel Patterns
Many consumers engage with retailers across multiple devices, making it useful to analyze cross-device patterns of buyer behavior. For instance, Facebook has partnered with Square so that information about foot traffic gathered from Facebook’s own app can be combined with information from Square credit card swipes, integrating data about social media and offline behavior. Importing this type of data into your customer relationship management software can help provide an integrated view of buyer behavior across both online and offline channels.