Using Customer Intelligence to Understand Customers and Give Them What They Want

Know thy customer, and you will be able to please thy customer. When dealing with consumers, information is often lost in the hustle & bustle of everyday dealings. Few are able to fully utilize the signals their customers give in order to reap the rewards. Customer intelligence is aimed at doing just that.

It’s all about data in this age of e-commerce.

Once you have it, you’re working with first-hand accounts of how your customers wish to be treated, what they want to obtain, and how they think these things are to come about.

But data can be tricky to utilize effectively.

First of all, you have to obtain it. And not in any fishy manners if you want to build trust with your customers. 

Secondly, the information provided by customers won’t be in a set format that’s easy to collate, making it difficult and time-consuming to process.

Finally, it’s very easy for these pieces of information to slip through the cracks and get lost, never making their way to the people who would be able to use them.

So, once you have this data, how do you go about using this valuable resource? The secret lies in the art of customer intelligence.

What is customer intelligence?

Customer intelligence is a catch-all term for analyzing customer data in order to find new ways to conform your business to their wants & needs.

While this might sound simple, it’s actually difficult in practice to achieve such an analysis due to the fact that consumers have different preferences.

Think of it like making coffee just the way someone likes it. 

Sure, there are common factors between all of the cups you might make – coffee, milk, sugar, etc. – but there will be subtle differences that make the difference between a good cup of coffee and a great one. ☕

Customer intelligence can factor in those needs when potential customers approach you and vice versa.

It takes into account various data points such as age, location, habits, and more so that you can work with customers on an individual level. It means using all of the different combinations of these that might crop up when dealing with customers. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that this is enough data to give anyone a headache!

As a consequence, utilizing customer intelligence is always done with the help of specialized software. It’s simply too much data for a human to process by hand in any useful amount of time.

Why is customer intelligence important?

In the age of the internet, and even more so following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce has become more and more personalized. 

It’s no secret that customers expect a personalized experience when dealing with a repeat seller, as 59% of them admit that it has an impact on their purchase decisions.

The customer experience has become increasingly relevant over the past few decades, with consumers following their hearts instead of cold numbers. 

Many will even select an objectively inferior product or service if they deem the experience they have with the seller to be more pleasant. After all, customers cite bad experiences as their number one reason for switching brands or providers.

And how do you provide good experiences? By understanding their individual desires.

What can customer intelligence do for you?

After talking about how emotions are so crucial to business, it’s time to get down to some cold hard facts (I love my coffee with a hint of irony).

As mentioned, improving the customer experience is an excellent idea that will boost your bottom line.

In the next section, we dive into the details of how customer intelligence makes it possible. While more strategies exist, the ones we’ll lay out definitely pack the biggest punch. ????

Cross-selling & up-selling

It’s often quite rare for people to go to a shop for a single item and actually walk away with only that item. 

There are just so many good deals that you can see, and you just have to try them out, right?

Online, things are different. 

You can’t see the entire store out of the corner of your eye like you can in a brick-and-mortar location. 

In fact, you’ll often only visit those pages directly relevant to the single item you’re looking for.

So, how do you show off your wares? Cross-selling and up-selling.

They’re both methods of encouraging customers to view items other than the one they specifically came to your site for, with cross-selling being concerned with complimentary products and up-selling with upgraded ones.

Essentially, they’re a means of getting a customer to want to spend more.

These can be done through advertisement banners, recommended product sections, and by related product sections on product pages.

The catch? Items often have multiple uses and reasons behind purchases, meaning you won’t necessarily know why an individual is after a certain product. 

This makes cross-selling and up-selling a bit less effective.

But with customer intelligence at your disposal, you’ll have the information you need to nudge individuals toward their next purchase.

For example, a customer may purchase a DDR2 piece of RAM, a common computer part.

They might be after it because it’s what they currently have and need a replacement, in which case advising the DDR3 as an up-sell is valid.

Or, they might be working with a legacy computer, one not compatible with DDR3, in which case it wouldn’t be.

If you know which one is the case, you know which action to take.

Below you’ll see a great example of how Amazon utilizes cross-selling.

Amazon offers both a “for you” section as well as one on trending deals. You can clearly see a theme across the top row of items, showing its effectiveness at showcasing an individual’s tastes.

This dual-focus method ensures that while general items that are enjoyed by many are not ignored when it comes to cross-selling, the individual is also acknowledged.

Customer retention

Consumers have changed the way they operate in recent years, being more willing than ever to switch brands or providers over minor disagreements or small mistakes.

One of the biggest changes we saw was the rise of e-commerce transactions, with people turning more and more to ordering products online. 

This makes the e-commerce customer experience critical for driving revenue. If your layout is confusing and the infrastructure is ancient, users will quickly become frustrated. And when that happens, they will easily leave your site in favor of another.

Seems plausible, right? When emotions run high, decisions are made that otherwise might not have been. 

There’s a very real possibility that customers will leave your website if they don’t get the personalized, easy-to-use experience they want. When they do, that’s another customer lost.

And perhaps worse than just another purchase lost, it may be an existing customer that’s not coming back.

Low customer retention is one of the most damning factors when it comes to e-commerce profits, simply because customers cost much more to obtain than they do to keep.

While customer intelligence won’t solve your infrastructure issues, it will help improve other aspects of the customer experience immensely. With all that information you possess, you’re able to highly personalize the experiences each individual has to a great degree. Be it specific items or even your site’s layout.

Given a choice between these two options:

  • A simple cookie-cutter website that’s rigid and confusing.
  • A personalized experience on a website that responds to the way you use it and makes itself easier to navigate.

Which would you pick?

Channel analytics

When you’re running an e-commerce business, you’re often operating across multiple channels of communication. It’s not enough to simply use one social media platform, for example, as you’ll miss out on selling to those who use others.

But what works on one platform won’t necessarily work on the others. Not just because they operate differently but due to the audience that frequents each channel.

With customer intelligence on your side, you can not only measure customer behavior on an individual level but apply these principles to the different channels of communication you work with.

After all, if you have data on the individuals, it’s not hard to lump those together for group analysis.

Then, you’re able to easily translate the customer intelligence data into a form that applies to the individual channels and analyze it accordingly.

This can give you information on:

  • Different customer behaviors by channel.
  • Effectiveness of customer service in each channel.
  • How specific customer service tactics work with each channel.
  • Your ROI for each channel.
  • Sales tactic effectiveness by channel.

Useful, right? You can even use the information you gain from this analysis to determine whether or not it’s worth keeping a channel of communication open.

You might be thinking, why don’t I just perform an analysis on each channel? Surely that’s just as effective?

Well, yes and no. 

You see, you can always use individual data as building blocks to create channel data, but you can’t do it the other way around.

This means that if you want to see how demographics affect each channel, you’d have to factor that into your data collection methods. 

While that might seem like common sense, sometimes you’ll only think of analyzing a factor after the fact, meaning you’d need to do the whole data collection part all over again. 

All-in-all, customer intelligence can always build up to a bigger picture, which is one of its most useful traits.

Optimization & cost-effectiveness

This one follows on from both customer retention & channel analytics, but it’s also its own thing, so a separate title is due.

On the surface level, increased customer retention means lower costs, and channel analytics means that you can optimize your approaches to each channel.

But it goes deeper than that.

When you deal with customers on the individual level, you’ll need to provide individual experiences. Customer intelligence lets you gain the information you need to provide this in a very short time frame, meaning you don’t waste time and money on ineffective techniques.

Overall, the information that customer intelligence provides means that every aspect of your organization can be streamlined, improved, and cut back when necessary. It cuts right to the heart of what customers want, which is the essence of e-commerce.

Brand loyalty

Loyal customers are hard to come by, but they’re well worth the effort to maintain. 

In addition to the retention benefits mentioned above, loyal customers will act as advocates for your brand. It’s like having your own organic advertising department, except it’s free!

So, what do brand loyalty and brand equity have to do with customer intelligence?

The thing about loyalty is that it doesn’t just come overnight. You need to perform consistently well in order to build up loyalty.

While in face-to-face transactions, you can usually tell how the customer reacts to specific methods and adjust accordingly, you have no point of reference as to how to best approach a customer online.

So, how do you choose the best approach? Well, with customer intelligence, you can make educated guesses using an individual’s data. 

This approach won’t be accurate in the beginning, however as time goes on and you gather more data on an individual, you will be able to adjust your approaches more effectively.

You might be thinking that this sounds like developing a relationship with that individual, and you’d be right. It’s simply done via software, as no human could ever keep up with that many individuals at once.

More effective approaches = more customer satisfaction = more loyalty.

The types of customer intelligence data

Generally speaking, customer intelligence data falls into two types, internal and external. The latter branches out into several other sub-types, but it’s quite straightforward and well worth familiarizing yourself with them.

It’s important to note from the get-go that both internal and external types of customer intelligence mix zero, first, and third-party data.

This means we recommend using both forms to gather as much relevant data as possible, especially as zero and first-party data becomes more and more precious with privacy concerns going up in recent years.

Internal customer intelligence

Internal data is the blanket term used to cover anything generated within your organization.

You can obtain internal data from your databases, point-of-sale systems, etc. The data that you receive from this won’t necessarily be different from that obtained externally, but it can be considered more organic and representative of a person’s true feelings than the data generated by prompted methods.

This data is the data that you don’t have to go out of your way to collect. It’s data that you’ve naturally picked up over the course of an individual’s interactions with you.

External customer intelligence

External data is what you get when you specifically gather customer intelligence data.

This data can be obtained via survey, from cookies, information that a user has been prompted to give to you, etc.

This data is often the more useful of the two types as it fills in the gaps and lets you see why certain methods are preferred, certain lines of communication are more used, etc. 

You can split externally-gathered customer intelligence data into three types, personal, geographic, and attitudinal.

Personal data

Personal data is all about demographics. That can mean:

  • Age.
  • Career.
  • Disability status.
  • Education level.
  • Gender.
  • Income.
  • Marital status.
  • Religion.

All of this is incredibly useful when trying to personalize the experiences you can provide, not the least to avoid making irrelevant or even downright unhelpful changes.

There are many ways in which personalization can go wrong, but the more personal information you have, the greater your chances of making it go right.

Geographic data

This covers anything to do with location. It lets you know roughly where a person is when they buy from you.

Why is this important information? Surely when working online it’s all the same, right?

Well, no. 

Certain tactics and strategies might work well in an urban environment but not in a rural one. Why? Because the people who live in these different places think in different ways.

Different environments create different experiences, which in turn means different habits are developed. While not exactly the same, there will be rough similarities in how people who live in the same city might behave online.

Similarly, there are probably differences between cities, states, and countries that need to be accounted for when drawing up plans.

Different geographies can also mean different delivery times, languages, tones, and more.

Attitudinal data

Attitudinal data is a little trickier to quantify, as it can change over time. 

Effectively, it consists of any information on how an individual perceives your brand and the general emotions they feel towards it.

A useful tactic to gather such data is by going through review data.

This gives you a direct line to the voice of the customer, helping you understand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and (what’s the T for swot?)

To complement the review data, you can conduct other market research methods like surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups. These can help you get a more rounded picture of attitudinal data.

The process of utilizing customer intelligence: 5 steps to follow

It’s time to get down and dirty.

When trying to utilize customer intelligence, there are five key steps that need to be taken. It’s important to keep these steps in order and not miss any out, as they’re all necessary to obtain a complete picture.

Keep in mind, however, that you can always cycle back a step if your data is confusing. If it’s hard to analyze, hard to decide what to do with, etc., you might just need more data or data from a different source.

Before we begin going over the steps, though, a brief disclaimer.

Customer intelligence is highly contextual, meaning that when you’re performing it you absolutely need to have your aims in mind.

You can’t just perform customer intelligence for the sake of it, as the algorithms and data collection methods will differ depending on what area of the customer experience you’re trying to take a look at.

That said, let’s begin.

???? Step 1: Sourcing

The first step in the process is to choose your sources.

While each source that you could draw from will give some amount of similar data, there are distinct differences between how they operate and what data you can obtain from them.

You can split sources into three types: transactional, behavioral, and psychographic. We’ll talk a little more about them later on.

???? Step 2: Collection

The second step is data collection. 

Once you have your sources, you need to collect data from them. This can be done via website monitoring, heat maps, surveys, and more.

The data collection methods you should use are heavily dependent on the type of source you’re drawing from, so keep that in mind.

???? Step 3: Categorization

Next, you need to categorize your data.

This step is usually done while keeping the different facets of your organization in mind. If you’re looking to improve a specific area of your business, you should place the most weight on the relevant data.

Data can fall into the following categories:

  • Direct feedback, such as reviews & ratings.
  • Indirect feedback, such as comments & chatter.
  • Inferred feedback, such as history, cookies, and location-based data.

Direct feedback can be seen as a reflection of the customer experience, meaning it’s up to the marketing & customer service departments to use.

Indirect feedback is more broad but generally valuable for marketing & product testing departments.

Inferred feedback is all about website data, so it’s the domain of your dev team & design team.

All of these categories contain useful information, but some are more useful in specific contexts than others.

???? Step 4: Analysis

Once your data is all sorted into neat little packages, it’s time to analyze it.

This step is where customer intelligence software packages really shine. It’s one thing to know how to analyze data in theory, but a whole other ballpark to actually perform it.

Some common analyses methods that come pre-programmed include:

  • Customer lifetime value predictions.
  • Customer behavior modeling.
  • Predictive customer analysis.
  • Dynamic micro-segmentation.
  • Actionable insights.
  • Customer persona modeling.
  • One-to-one insight generation.

By using these pre-existing software packages, you’ll save yourself countless hours of hard work. We’ll discuss some of the platforms to generate customer intelligence available later on, as well as their features, advantages & disadvantages.

???? Step 5: Taking action

Finally, once your data has been analyzed, you need to take action.

This step is the crucial one where a lot of customer intelligence strategies fall apart. You see, in order to take action on your data, you need to be able to use the methods necessary to utilize it most efficiently.

Whether this is integrating new software into your website, adding this information to customer journey maps & workflows, or even altering your marketing campaign approaches entirely to account for different responses, you need to commit to these changes if you plan to get the most out of your data.

Change is scary, we can all agree on that, and many businesses would rather stick with tried and true methods than take a chance on something that may or may not work. 

So why should you act on customer intelligence? Why should you risk your profit margins?

Simply put, if you’re thinking of these actions as entirely new strategies, you need to reframe your perspective on them.

Customer intelligence isn’t about telling you what to do. It’s about finding out what you already do, to some degree at least, that is the most effective. 

When taking action, you’re not altering your direction, merely refining it. 

You can use customer intelligence to measure responses to new methods, that’s true, but the information you gain is useful in all aspects of your organization.

What are the sources of customer intelligence?

As mentioned above, the different sources of your data will grant you different information on customer behavior. 

Selecting your sources is the first step in the customer intelligence process, and making that selection depends heavily on what you’re trying to achieve. 

So, what are the types, then? Well, they generally fall into three types, transactional, behavioral, and psychographic.

Transactional

Transactional data is all about purchase history.

Think back to the last few times you’ve ordered items online. There are probably several of those items that fit a trend or are even repeat purchases. Sound about right?

Purchases rarely take place in a vacuum, and what you buy today is likely going to have an impact on what you buy in the future.

In the same way, what customers have bought from you in the past will show trends that can indicate what they might want to buy next. Using these, you can tailor your recommendations, discounts, etc., to each individual’s tastes. 

If you received a discount offer for a product you were thinking of buying in the future anyway, wouldn’t that tempt you to go through with it?

Behavioral

Behavioral data is concerned with customer behavior. In the realm of e-commerce, that translates to how they behave while using your website, emails, app, etc.

Now, you might be thinking, is it possible to track these factors? Well, yes. 

With emails, I recommend tracking mostly clicks rather than opens. Clicks are a strong indicator of subscribers’ intentions, while opens are much weaker ones. Further, with Apple MPP causing inaccurate open data, it’s best not to rely on this metric as it can lead you to false conclusions.

On your website and app, you can track various metrics such as time on page, viewed products, abandoned pages, and much more. In fact, there’s so much data readily available that it’s best to hone in on your goals before diving into them.

Psychographic

Psychographic data is about customer intentions. 

You can think of it as the underlying reasons behind purchases and what encourages someone to buy certain products.

You can get psychographic data in two ways.

First, there is the direct route where you simply ask them. Customer surveys, questionnaires, preference centers, and reading reviews all fall into this category. 

Remember though, while customers are mostly honest when filling out these forms, they may not remember or even be aware of the full story. Thus, treat these answers wisely.

Secondly, there are indirect indications that can inform you about customer intentions.

Transactional & behavioral data are often the sources that lead to this type of psychographic data, as what they show allows you to infer factors that otherwise might have been missed.

To give an easy example, imagine you’ve just received an order for some hockey equipment. It can be described as:

  • Good quality.
  • All bright red or white.
  • Dispatched to New York.

These facts alone don’t tell you much about why the customer purchased these particular items. However, when you take a look at their purchase history, you find that a previous order was dispatched to Detroit.

Taken together, these two factors indicate that this person might be a fan of the Detroit Red Wings and was motivated to buy these particular items as they resemble the team’s uniform.

Indirectly obtained information can be wrong sometimes, as there can be factors that appear together simply by coincidence. When dealing with a customer for whom you have little information, this is expected, and you can adjust your software accordingly.

As time goes on and more evidence is gathered, you can relax and become more confident in your deductions. 

After all, if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. ????

Customer intelligence platforms to help you understand up from down

The customer intelligence platform you should use will largely depend on what you intend to do with it. 

Some are built for large-scale enterprises, some smaller, and some scale. There are also key differences in how each platform operates, with some being better than others at certain tasks. 

As you can see in the below chart from SoftwareReviews, users of each platform rate them differently in two different yet equally important aspects, features & vendor experience.

Overall, you should look carefully at each option before you decide, but let’s go through some of the more commonly used ones and assess their capabilities.

Revuze

Not to toot our own horn, but the Revuze platform does a stellar job at gathering and analyzing data, providing you with easy-to-understand reports and insights.

 

Not only that, it does everything in real-time and in a couple of clicks.

 

This means that you can respond to customers’ needs and demands swiftly, allowing you to gain a crucial advantage over competitors.

 

But don’t take my word for it. 

 

Our recent case study with Georgia-based grill innovator Char-Broil tells that story much better.

Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics, a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, has the ability to interface with all other pieces of software within the Cloud. In particular, the AI-powered Adobe Target.

The downside? Like most Adobe products, it’s difficult to interface with software from other providers, so if you already use these, you’ll need to build an interfacing program to translate between the two.

Gavagai Explorer

Gavagai Explorer’s text analytics boasts multilingual features, quite useful for those working across borders. 

It also boasts an API that allows for interfacing with third-party platforms, notably Slack, SurveyMonkey & Zendesk.

Pricing starts at $130 per month, with a limitation of 20 ongoing projects per user.

Graphext

Graphext is a Spanish company that supports six languages in its main version, with another four being in beta versions.

Their seamless translation abilities are particularly useful for those wanting to operate in Europe, Latin America, and South America, as English, Spanish & Portuguese are among the languages that have been fully developed.

Users have noted that Graphext is cloud-based and limited to small or medium businesses due to its capacity limits. The platform is also available to individuals for small use with zero charges.

The downsides? As a small company, Graphext isn’t able to easily respond to queries, only offering a text-based chat solution currently. They’re also fairly new and thus not well established in terms of API integrations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a Microsoft product line, so you know it’s going to be able to run on almost any Windows system. It’s also available in both cloud and on-site versions.

Dynamics boasts excellent ratings for usability, good ratings for support, and mixed reviews for its user interface options.

As a Microsoft-provided app, it also boasts the ability to interface with dozens of third-party applications. It speaks the same language as your operating system, after all.

One complication is that Dynamics is not one app but a series of twelve applications. Naturally, these all seamlessly work together. However, for those working on mobile devices, this isn’t ideal.

Optimove

Optimove CI is known for its user-friendly interface, flexibility, and easy learning curve.

As an organization founded in 2009, Optimove has had a long time to refine its processes. It’s known for great database organization abilities, as well as for learning exactly what customers want. 

One of their greatest strengths, according to reviewers, is its very visual interface which makes visualizing concepts easy.

Downsides quoted include manual importing of data, issues with integrations, and an inability to delete templates which can quickly leave you swamped in them.

People Pattern

People Pattern comes from a US-based company operating outside of Silicon Valley. It’s rated highly for its data import abilities and its analytics but less highly for support & integrations.

One aspect that sets People Pattern apart from its contemporaries is its highly-rated customization abilities, which users have cited as their main reasons for purchase.

On the flip side, this software is only really useful for small & mid-size businesses or individuals. 

Signal CI Platform

Signal’s main pros are all about integration and scalability. That said, ease of use isn’t quite up to standard with some of the other platforms on this list. 

Signal CI also suffers from dataset size limitations, making it unideal for larger businesses. It more than makes up for this, however, with its Rules Engine feature that allows for automatic data filtering during collection & segmentation.

Overall, a solid choice for anyone from individuals to medium-sized enterprises.

Takeaways

Customer intelligence can be tricky to get to grips with, but once you’re more familiar, you’ll have access to a wealth of customer information.

Ultimately, customer intelligence in e-commerce is driven by the need to personalize and customize the user experience, lest you be left behind by others who do this more effectively. It’s one thing to know what your data says you need to do and another to actually put that into action.

Fortunately, we’ve recently published an article on that very topic, so check out our complete guide to e-commerce personalization next, so you can put your customer intelligence insights into action!

Customer Feedback Analysis: Analyzing & Understanding What Your Customers Are Saying

Customer feedback is a treasure trove of information with a wealth of insights to offer businesses seeking to improve products and boost revenue. But having feedback is not enough on its own. To understand what customers tell you, employing customer feedback analysis is a must, especially when done at scale. Learn what it means and how to do so successfully.

One of the most impactful approaches you can take to help your business grow is to become a customer-centric company. 

Because not only do customer-centric companies win over the loyalty of their audience for the long term, but they also see the financial benefit of doing so, being 60% more profitable than their competitors. 

In order to truly center your business around your customer, you’ll need to create a culture that commits to listening and catering to the customer’s opinions, thoughts, and needs. And there is no better tool for this than customer feedback analysis. 

By allowing you to systematically and regularly tap into your customers’ opinions, customer feedback analysis enables you to make smarter, more strategic business decisions that help you retain a highly loyal customer base.

In this article, we review everything you need to know about how to successfully implement customer feedback analysis in order to improve business outcomes. 

What is customer feedback analysis?

To understand what customer feedback analysis is and why it’s so important to modern businesses, let’s break the term down into its parts.

The customer part of customer feedback analysis

The customer, or the individual or entity that makes a purchase from your company, is absolutely key to your business’s success. 

As much effort as we may spend in building audiences, courting prospects, and attracting users, it is ultimately the paying customer who directly contributes to your bottom line. 

In understanding your customers, their needs, their pain points, and their opinions of your brand and your product, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions to improve e-commerce customer experience and customer satisfaction, and boost revenue as a result. 

The feedback part of customer satisfaction analysis

Customer feedback is all of the qualitative and quantitative data you receive from your customers that reflect their opinions, preferences, and concerns as they relate to your industry, company, and product. 

You can collect customer feedback through a number of channels, including but not limited to:

  • Emails
  • Surveys
  • Customer service portals 
  • Social media messages and comments
  • Third-party review websites

Feedback may be solicited or unsolicited and can come in several forms, including written comments as well as scores and ratings.

The analysis part of customer feedback analysis

Customer feedback is a form of raw data that contains a multitude of valuable insights for your company.

It is the process of analysis that helps you take this raw data, structure it, and explore it in order to find patterns, identify problems, and extract actionable insights that you can implement in order to make improvements to your product and processes.

???? For more analysis examples, check out our blogs on product performance analysis and competitive product analysis.  

Why should you analyze customer feedback?

Satisfied customers are the lifeblood of a successful business. 

By creating a superior, satisfying customer experience, you are motivating customers to take a number of desirable actions, including

  • Paying more.
  • Recommending your business/products to others.
  • And coming back for repeat purchases.

Indeed, 86% of customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for a superior customer experience. Further, a better retention rate is paramount for businesses seeking growth as existing customers are easier to sell to and are likely to pay more for new products than first-time customers.

Customer feedback analysis holds the key to creating an exceptional customer experience that keeps your customers coming back for more. 

By collecting, analyzing, and acting on the insights you find in customer feedback, you will be able to give customers what they want, address any problems, and gain a reputation as a customer-centric company like massively popular and successful brands.

How do you analyze customer feedback?

While analyzing customer feedback isn’t as simple as throwing numbers at a computer, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated.

In the next section, we break the process into five steps. And when working with dedicated customer feedback analysis tools, you can even skip most of them.

Step 1: Collecting customer feedback

The first step of customer feedback analysis is collecting customer feedback. Here are a few important sources of customer feedback.

Customer calls, chats, and helpdesk emails

This unsolicited form of customer feedback is incredibly valuable, as it represents problems and concerns that customers feel strongly enough about to have actively contacted your company to discuss. 

For this reason, it is best practice to automate a system in which helpdesk emails and customer service call transcripts are automatically added to a feedback database.

In this chatbot conversation from TheKnowledgeGym, a customer shares important feedback, including how they found a brand, how often they use its product, how they use the product, and more.

Surveys

There are a number of customer satisfaction surveys that are commonly used to collect customer feedback. These include:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)This metric measures how likely customers are to recommend your company to a friend or family member. 
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – This metric measures customer satisfaction by directly asking how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or customer service interaction.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) – This metric measures how hard or easy a customer finds a product or service to use.

You can solicit answers to these surveys through a number of channels, including your website, your mobile app, text message, and email. Individually – and even more so collectively – these surveys can all reveal highly valuable data about customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

NPS score

Here, clothing company Hem & Stitch uses an NPS survey to measure customer loyalty.

Social media comments and messages

Your social media is a fantastic source of customer feedback, with many users these days preferring to reach out to a company with a problem or question over Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram rather than through traditional customer service channels. 

Like with customer calls and emails, it is recommended to automatically forward communication received over social media to your feedback database.

However, not all mentions of you on social media will occur on your account, and not all will tag you. For example, a customer might tweet their opinion about your product on their own personal Twitter account without using any tags or hashtags to alert you to the mention. 

For this reason, it’s wise to engage in an ongoing practice of social listening, or actively monitoring social media in order to find mentions of your brand, even if it’s untagged.

twitter engagement

On Twitter, users are regularly mentioning and posting feedback about brands and products without tagging them.

Online reviews

A final source of customer feedback that we highly recommend tapping into is the online review, a go-to place for customers to share their opinions. You may be able to find reviews of your company in a number of places including:

  • Through your own website.
  • Through general review websites like Yelp and Google Reviews.
  • Through industry-specific review websites like MakeupAlley or Angi.
  • On the app store if you have a mobile app.
  • Reviews on marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, and eBay.

amazon reviews bring powerful customer feedback

A customer shares a wealth of important feedback about a product’s color, quality, and sizing through an Amazon review.

Step 2: Structure raw data

Once you have collected customer feedback data, you’ll be the proud owner of a giant mountain of unstructured data. In order to be able to learn something from this information, you’ll have to find a way to organize and categorize it into something more useful. 

First, we recommend going over the data to identify important keywords such as product names, locations, features, etc. Then, you’ll be able to organize the data into categories, which will allow you to identify trends in the data.

Great, now we have neat and ready-to-analyze data. What’s next?

A great way to draw insights from your data is to categorize it. There are endless ways to do that, so it’s important to know what you’re looking for before starting.

Here are some ideas to get you inspired:

  • Topic – If you seek feedback on a specific topic, such as price, delivery speed, or sizing, it is best to categorize data by topic.
  • Sentiment – An approach that is often helpful is to split feedback up by whether it is positive, neutral, or negative. Sentiment analysis is one of the best ways to keep informed on how your product is doing.
  • Type of feedback – Another option is to categorize based on what the feedback is aiming to do. This can be customers that complain, suggest a new product, request a new color, etc.
  • Priority – Some feedback may point to something that needs urgent fixing, like a bug. This is why it can be helpful to organize by priority ranging from less to more urgent.
  • Customer type – You may find useful insights by splitting up feedback by customer type, including paying, trial, non-paying, premium, or VIP/rewards status.
  • Location – If your company has multiple locations or is international, you can categorize feedback by city, state, or country.
  • Product – If you have multiple products, it may be helpful to group feedback by which product it pertains to.

Structuring raw data is something that can be done manually. 

However, not only is it incredibly time-consuming, but error-prone humans are liable to make mistakes every now and then. 

Instead, most companies will rely on some form of technology for this step, whether it’s simpler Excel sheets or more sophisticated dedicated data structuring software.

Step 3: Identifying insightful data

The next step is to separate the insightful data – or new data that either confirms a hypothesis you had or contradicts your prior working assumptions – from non-insightful data, which is data that points to an issue you already knew about. 

When determining whether or not data is insightful, ask yourself:

  • Does this data validate a hypothesis we had?
  • Can this data motivate us to think more critically?
  • Can this data lead us to take action to make an improvement? 
  • Can this data reshape our strategies?

For the rest of the steps of customer feedback analysis, you can set aside the non-insightful data to focus exclusively on the insightful data.

Step 4: Write a customer feedback analysis report

A customer feedback analysis report is a document summarizing the findings of your customer feedback analysis and laying out recommendations for how to follow up. 

How do you write a customer feedback analysis report? We recommend including the following five key sections.

???? Background – Discuss your company’s current state and why you are engaging in customer feedback analysis. Lay out any hypotheses you may have about what you might find in the data. Mention any relevant changes that the company has made recently.

???? Methodology – Explain how you conducted your customer feedback analysis. Review what sources of feedback you used, how you structured your raw data, what tools you used, what your sample size was, and any other relevant details.

???? Results – Display your data in as easy-to-understand a way as possible. Quantitative data can be displayed through graphs and charts. For qualitative data, you may want to choose select quotes to display that demonstrate relevant trends in the data. 

???? Analysis – Discuss the insights that you found in the data. What problems came up, if any? What new features or products did your customers request? What surprised you? Were your hypotheses confirmed or contradicted?

???? Recommendations – Make your recommendations for the next steps. Based on the insights you found, what actions can your company take in order to improve business outcomes? 

Step 5: Act on insights

It’s important to emphasize that customer feedback analysis is only the beginning of a process of ongoing improvement. 

Feedback analysis can serve as an arrow pointing the way in a direction that your company can go in order to improve customer satisfaction and experience. 

It’s up to you to follow the arrow and fix the problems, create new products, and make the tweaks your customers ask for. 

Example of customer feedback analysis

Let’s say you own a start-up that built an app customers can use in order to identify problems in their house plants, such as pests, underwatering, and insufficient sunlight. One of your company’s values is being data-driven, and you aim to become the go-to plant diagnosis app by becoming customer-centric and offering the features customers will prefer most. For this reason, you have decided to implement an ongoing customer feedback analysis process. 

You choose to collect customer feedback through several channels including:

  • App store reviews.
  • NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.
  • Social media mentions.
  • Customer calls, emails, and chatbot messages.

Once you gather a sufficient sample size of customer data, your business decides to categorize it by topic into the following groups:

  • Feedback about pricing.
  • App bugs.
  • Feature requests.

Once you’ve removed non-insightful data and used an AI tool to group your insightful data into the relevant categories, your business intelligence team generates the following important insights from your data:

  • Trial users aren’t converting into paid users because they feel that the monthly price of the app is too high.
  • Customers are expressing interest in a feature that allows them to browse photos of other plants with the same issue as theirs.

Based on these insights and your BI team’s customer feedback analysis report, your company has decided to lower the monthly subscription fee by 10% and begin work on building the new feature your customers asked for.

Customer feedback analysis and acting on it isn’t some pie-in-the-sky process. It’s something you can do, and your competitors are most likely already doing it.

Customer feedback analysis tools

As we mentioned above, manually conducting customer feedback analysis can be challenging.

The manpower required to go through hundreds or thousands of comments, transcripts, and messages is tremendous, requiring more resources and time than many companies have to spare. 

To help you be more efficient and accurate in your customer feedback analysis, here are some tools worth looking into.

Revuze 

Revuze is a powerful insights tool that uses AI technology in order to automatically collect unstructured customer feedback data from multiple sources, structure it, and organize it into granular, actionable insights. 

Revuze’s machine learning algorithm operates independently to discover relevant topics and trends within the data and analyze sentiment in order to accurately report on customer satisfaction. 

This is a great all-in-one customer feedback analysis solution perfect for implementing a more efficient, scalable customer feedback analysis strategy than what you’d be able to achieve by hand.

Typeform

Typeform is an online survey creator known for being highly intuitive and user-friendly. This tool is great for building and sending out customer satisfaction surveys in order to collect feedback to analyze. 

Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft’s interactive data visualization software that can help you create reports and model the customer feedback data you collect. 

By helping give you a clearer, more visual picture of your data, Power BI can help you better understand it in order to reach valuable insights.

What comes after analyzing customer feedback?

In today’s consumer landscape, it takes more than a great product to win market share. 

The modern consumer seeks an exceptional customer experience from brands that makes them feel seen and understood. 

In order to satisfy customers, win their loyalty, and gain a brand reputation as a company that puts customers first, you need to tune into what customers are saying about you, what they want from you, and what changes they’re asking for. 

Customer feedback analysis is an incredibly powerful process that allows you to keep your finger on your customers’ pulse in order to remain on top of things and continually deliver a delightful experience. 

Best of all? With the right tools, you can automate and optimize these workflows so they can become an integral part of your process without eating up all of your time.

Analyzing your customers’ feedback is a never-ending process. One way to gain insights into the minds of your customers is by conducting focus groups. But to make the most out of them, you’ve got to ask the right questions. Find out more in our blog on the topic

How to Implement E-commerce Personalization and Revolutionize Your Brand

It’s no secret that nowadays, customers expect and demand a more personal touch from companies they do business with. That’s why e-commerce personalization is essential for the success and growth of your business. Whether you’re looking to get started with personalization or to improve its effectiveness, this guide is for you. 

In the age of the “For You Page” and “Based on your previous interaction” messages, a one-size-fits-all approach to e-commerce simply won’t do. Because the modern consumer doesn’t just want personalization – they demand it. 

According to McKinsey, ​​71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t get them. That’s why companies that can deliver personalization generate 40% more revenue than those that can’t. 

The bottom line? 

In today’s commercial landscape, personalization is a must for e-commerce companies that want to capture market share and grow their revenue. 

Those who don’t offer personalization will fall behind. 

But those who do will reap the rewards.

This article will offer a complete guide for companies who want to get familiar with personalization and for those that seek to improve it.

We’ll share insights on what it is, why you need it, and how to do it, along with inventive e-commerce personalization examples. 

Let’s dive in. 

What is e-commerce personalization?

E-commerce personalization is the practice of using real-time zero and first-party customer data to display dynamic content specific to the customer. 

A range of user data can be the basis of e-commerce personalization, including their:

  • Demographics. 
  • Browsing history.
  • Past purchases.
  • What device they’re on. 
  • And more. 

In this personalized example, Mother Earth Products uses subscribers’ date of birth to offer discounts on their special day

E-commerce personalization can be delivered across multiple channels, including on a website, in an app, and through emails and text messages. Further, it can be presented to any lead, no matter where they are in the sales funnel.

The truth is that personalized e-commerce is already pretty dominant, and you’ve most likely seen it all over the place, like in:

  • Personalized site layouts.
  • Personalized product recommendations.
  • Personalized messages.
  • Redirects to a geographical site with geo-located offers.
  • Cart abandonment emails.
  • Reminders to re-order a product.
  • Personalized offers.

When done well, a personalized e-commerce experience can feel like magic. 

Each customer is given a VIP treatment customized to their needs, leading them on a journey from brand awareness to product discovery to repeat purchasing.

Seven benefits of personalization in e-commerce 

E-commerce personalization offers many crucial benefits to both customers and businesses. It’s an incredibly effective tool that it has become an absolute must-have for any company.

Let’s review what it can do for you and your shoppers.

Sales and conversions

First and foremost, e-commerce personalization can help you generate more sales than ever. 

A whopping 88% of online shoppers are more likely to continue shopping on an e-commerce website that offers a personalized experience.

This means that personalization is a key tool that can be used to convert visitors into paying customers, with everything from personalized recommendations to special discounts helping to increase conversion rates. 

Indeed, it’s reported that conversion rates increase considerably with the number of personalized page views, with conversion rates doubling from 1.7% to 3.4% when a visitor views three pages of personalized content as opposed to two. 

Customer experience

E-commerce personalization also has the added benefit of improving the e-commerce customer experience

By using data to get a clearer picture of your customers’ needs and pain points, you can better cater to individual customers, meeting their preferences throughout the entire customer journey.

Creating an experience in which customers only see what’s relevant to them, don’t have to re-input their payment information each time they make a purchase, and are notified about relevant promotions they’d want to know about – just to name a few things – all contribute to a more seamless, enhanced customer experience. 

Songkick uses personalization to notify subscribers about relevant events based on preferences and location.

Insights about customers

All of the data and important insights about your customers that you collect for the purpose of e-commerce personalization are valuable far beyond your personalization strategy. 

Remember, customers will be happy to share their data with you if treated with care. Use these data-collection efforts and leverage them into insights that will serve customers – all the way from improving your products to personalized marketing tactics. 

Customer service

That’s not to mention the fact that all of the data you capture can also be used for customer service to resolve issues more quickly and offer better solutions to any problems that might arise.

For instance, you may choose to offer special offers and rewards to VIP customers with a particularly high customer lifetime value, or you can use a customer’s location data to give them more accurate shipping time estimates. 

The latter can help avoid the issue that 42% of online customers face, where a product takes longer to be delivered than what was promised at the time of purchase. 

Brand loyalty

By giving your customers the kind of tailored experience they want and showing them that you know who they are and what they need, you’re able to capture their loyalty. 

If you can provide a more personalized, seamless customer experience, you can expect your customers to stick with you and continue choosing you over the competition, boosting brand equity

Customer retention

That improved customer experience and increased loyalty that personalization can help you achieve? It also does wonders for customer retention. 

And holding onto your customers is incredibly important as it costs between six to seven times more to get a new customer as opposed to keeping the customers you already have.

Competitive advantage & market share

As we mentioned above, customers don’t just expect personalization anymore; they demand it.

By successfully implementing e-commerce personalization, you’ll be able to deliver the experience your customers are looking for, allowing you to keep up with the modern digital landscape. 

To put it frankly, e-commerce personalization is essential to maintaining relevance and market share in today’s climate. 

Brands that don’t deliver will be left behind and passed over in favor of competitors that do. 

How to implement e-commerce personalization

Okay, we’ve made our point. E-commerce personalization is the new frontier, an undeniable necessity. The next step is implementing it, and to do so successfully, you’ll need to follow these steps.

Set your goals

As a starting point, begin by defining what you want to achieve with your e-commerce personalization efforts. 

Not only will this help guide you when you’re making choices about which tools and strategies to use, but it will also help you assess the success of your efforts later on. 

Some potential goals include:

  • Boosting conversions by 0.5%, with the average e-commerce conversion rate being 3.65%
  • Achieving an 80% customer satisfaction rating, with the average customer satisfaction rate in the retail sector being 77% in 2021
  • Increasing customer retention by 5%, with the average repeat customer rate for e-commerce being 28.2%

Map the customer journey

Next, you’ll need to decide which parts of the user experience you want to personalize. 

In order to do so, you’ll need to understand what your users’ journeys look like. From first learning about your brand to making a purchase and leaving a review, what interactions do your customers have? 

Make a map of all of the channels and touchpoints. 

Here is an example of a customer journey map template (well, a table) from Venngage that you can use to get started.

With that in hand, you’ll be able to decide where to implement elements of personalization throughout the customer journey. 

Ask yourself: which moments would benefit from a more contextual experience? 

For example, perhaps you have a high bounce rate from your front page. This might motivate you to try to add more personalization to the homepage of your website to create a customized experience right from the beginning.

Further, maybe you see that customers are generally unhappy with the payment experience leading to a high cart abandonment rate. 

This can indicate that you may need to add an element or personalization to the payment stage of the customer journey. Alternatively, maybe other actions are needed, like reducing form friction or adding trust badges.

Decide what to personalize

Now, you should be ready to decide which personalization methods you want to start with. As we mentioned above, there are a large variety of options for you here. Some popular personalized elements include:

  • Product recommendations – Use a user’s purchase history, location, and demographic information to deliver them recommendations for products they’re likely to be interested in. These can be delivered through email or on various pages on your website.

While proceeding to checkout, Uniqlo offers shoppers various products they might like based on their current purchase.

  • Targeted offers – From first-time purchase discounts to deals on items abandoned in a cart, targeted offers are a highly effective way to get customers to make a purchase. This example from Golden Village displays a Women’s Day promotion exclusively for female users, making this important day even more special.

  • Continuous shopping for return customers – Help a customer pick up right where they left off by displaying items they were previously looking at. In this Shopify example, you can see how continuous shopping would appear through its platform.

  • Dynamic pricing21% of e-commerce businesses use this strategy to adjust prices based on a buyer profile, demographic information, purchase history, and browsing history.
  • Personalized retargeting – Create a more specific retargeting campaign by reminding users of the exact products they were looking at. This Madewell Facebook ad presents shoppers with previously seen products.

Collect data

E-commerce personalization is built on your ability to capture key information about your website visitors. You’ll need to track data points such as:

  • Pages viewed.
  • Time on site.
  • Items favorited.
  • Items added to cart.
  • The last page viewed before leaving the website.
  • Email open rate.
  • Email click-through rate.
  • Past purchases.
  • Average order value.
  • The time interval between purchases.
  • Customer lifetime value.
  • Prior email or social media interactions.
  • Bounce rates.
  • Customer retention rates.
  • Abandoned cart rates.
  • Customer acquisition costs.
  • Sales conversion rate.
  • Net promoter score.
  • Time on site.
  • Transaction path length.

For each personalization method you’ve chosen to implement, think about the data you’ll have to capture and how you might be able to access that data. This can be via a CRM, website analytics, data captured during purchases, etc. 

A note on privacy

While on the topic of data collection, it’s important to broach the topic of the ethics that come with it. 

Although 65% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience, some have gotten increasingly savvy about and even wary of having companies collect, store, and use their data. 

For customers that want to keep data for themselves, there’s a solution. They can simply opt out. 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require websites to get users’ consent to have their data tracked. 

That’s what that “cookies” pop-up that you see on any new website you visit is all about. Asking for permission to gather data. 

Not only is complying with these data privacy laws required, but it also helps you build trust with your customers. Those who opt into personalization know that they are willingly volunteering their personal data so you can give them an optimized experience. 

Five e-commerce personalization tools that will drive your growth

Successful e-commerce personalization requires the use of a variety of tools to help with data collection and analysis, as well as personalization campaign implementation. 

Most major e-commerce platforms like Shopify actually offer a relatively robust suite of personalization options for you to play around with.

But there are other options out there for e-commerce personalization software. In fact, there are so many that it can be tough to know what tool to start with. 

When on the lookout for such a tool, keep an eye out for ones that have:

  • Customer segmentation.
  • Multi-channel support.
  • A/B testing.
  • A modern AI engine.
  • Compatibility with the e-commerce platform and any other tools you are using.
  • A strong customer success team to help you make the most out of the product.

Ultimately, like with any other tool, trying out a few demos is a good place to start to help you choose the software that best fits your business and its needs. 

To help you get started, here are a few popular tools you should know about. 

Insider

Insider is an easy-to-use e-commerce personalization platform that connects customer data across multiple channels, uses AI to predict future customer behavior, and creates personalized experiences. Insider can be used across multiple channels, including web, app, email, SMS, and more.

Bloomreach

Bloomreach offers a “Commerce Experience Cloud” with a number of tools powered by a customer data engine, including a content platform, AI-driven search and merchandising, a customer data platform, and marketing automation solutions.

Clerk.io

Clerk.io uses an e-commerce-specific AI technology called ClerkCore to help businesses personalize product recommendations, implement a behavior-based search engine, and integrate email marketing. It also integrates with all of the most popular e-commerce platforms.

Yieldify

Yieldify is another popular end-to-end personalization platform helping businesses deliver personalized experiences to customers no matter where they are in the funnel. They offer a variety of tools, including lead capture forms, social proof campaigns, personalized upsell experiences, and more. 

OptiMonk

OptiMonk is a personalization tool with advanced targeting features leveraging pop-ups to do everything from personalized product recommendations and special offers to stop cart abandonment while boosting upselling and cross-selling.

Revuze

Revuze is not a traditional e-commerce personalization platform, and we don’t claim to be one. That said, the insights you get from the Revuze dashboard will help you better understand what your customers want and need. This, in turn, will help with the development of future personalized products that align with customers’ expectations.

E-commerce personalization examples 

To help you understand what e-commerce personalization can look like in practice, let’s review a few examples of companies successfully using it to create a superior customer experience.

Special offers 

By tracking data and identifying which customers are visiting your website for the first time, you’re able to offer a special discount to first-time visitors, like recipe box company Gousto is doing for first-time visitors.

You can also create special offers on the basis of other useful information. For example, the sporting brand JD targets students with a unique promotion. 

Personalized product recommendations

Perhaps one of the most popular and effective applications of e-commerce personalization is to deliver personalized product recommendations. 

For example, you might offer personalized product recommendations on the basis of demographic information such as age or gender. Or you can personalize on the basis of customers’ prior interactions, showing them products similar to those they have looked at or put in their cart in the past.

Here, Zappos displays personalized shoe recommendations based on items the customer was previously looking at or searching for. By showing other shoes in similar styles, Zappos increases the likelihood of finding a shoe the customer fancies, increasing conversions.

In this email, Uber Eats sends a personalized product recommendation based on food orders the user has made in the past. Can’t blame them for loving their curries.

Suggesting complementary products

Knowing what products your users search and purchase can help you upsell and cross-sell by displaying other products that are similar or could help them “complete the look.” 

A shoulder bag will definitely go nicely with these jeans. Job well done by Farfetch.

Amazon is the master of upselling, as can be seen in the following example. The e-commerce giant shows other items that a person might want to buy along with the iPhone case they are looking at, namely two different types of screen protectors.

Geo-targeted offers and product recommendations

A user’s location is a powerful piece of data that can enable you to provide personalized offers and recommendations that are especially relevant to them. For example, you can show users items that are currently trendy in the state or country they live in. 

Or maybe you use somebody’s location to make sure that you are displaying the correct items for the correct season. 

While you may be featuring coats and scarves on your front page in December, this wouldn’t be relevant to people in the southern hemisphere. Using geographical data, you can personalize your website, so shoppers can browse summer hats and bathing suits instead. 

In the following example, Lesportsac displays more graphic, bolder designs for customers located in Hong Kong, where data analysis revealed that those types of styles are more popular. 

Continuous shopping

Similarly to how you’d leave a bookmark in a book to help you know where to pick up from when you continue reading, you can make a sale even more seamless by showing shoppers the items they were looking at before.

Here, Amazon once again provides a great e-commerce personalization example, this time for continuous shopping recommendations. 

Electric brushes are all the rage for this hygiene-savvy customer.

Cart abandonment emails

Win back users who you may have otherwise lost by sending emails to people who put an item in a cart and then exited your website. Remind them of the item they’re almost missing out on and/or offer a special discount to make the deal even sweeter.

Here, Crocus informs the user that the planter they were looking at before is still available and saved in their cart for purchase. This way, all the customer has to do to complete the purchase is to click the “go to checkout” button.

In this email, TodayTix reaches out to the customer, reminding them to grab the tickets for Mary Poppins they left in their cart, making it easy to complete their purchase. 

E-commerce personalization trends 

While it may be more popular now than ever, e-commerce personalization has proven to be more than just a temporary fad. It’s a new standard for e-commerce companies, helping to deliver an improved customer experience while boosting sales. 

Within the practice, however, there are plenty of trends that can come and go as companies discover new and interesting applications of the data they are collecting. Below, we outline some of the most popular trends in e-commerce personalization today.

Headless personalization

The term “headless personalization” refers to the practice of personalizing content without using a traditional web CMS. Instead, companies can work with a headless API to separate their front-end and back-end systems so that the customer data collected in the back end can be used to personalize the user experience on the front end. 

Essentially, headless personalization allows you to customize each individual user’s content without having to change the design of the entire website. This flexibility is highly useful, if not necessary, for creating the kind of personalized experience today’s customers expect. 

Omnichannel e-commerce personalization

The average person spends almost seven hours a day looking at a screen, including phones, tablets, computers, and more. 

Between websites, apps, all of the social media platforms, emails, texts, and chatbots, customers have no shortage of channels through which to shop and interact with a business. What’s more, 90% of customers expect their interactions across all of these channels to be consistent. 

This is why personalizing only one channel, like your web store, isn’t sufficient. 

An omnichannel approach to e-commerce personalization aims to create a personalized experience across all channels including online, in-store, mobile, and more. 

This is the only way to deliver the personalized experience your customers expect.

Privacy-first and anonymous personalization

With the GDPR making it illegal to use users’ information without their permission, privacy has emerged as a major concern for customers, with a whopping 96% of users choosing to opt-out of allowing apps to track their data in iOS 14.5. This has led to the rise of two important trends in e-commerce personalization.

Privacy-first personalization focuses on collecting only the data that is absolutely necessary to provide an improved, personalized customer experience. It aims to protect customers’ security and win their trust through a genuine interest in respecting each user’s privacy.

Anonymous personalization is the practice of personalizing the e-commerce experience without requiring a user to create an account or log in first. This is especially useful for first-time visitors as well as visitors who opt out of having their cookies tracked, allowing you to create a personalized experience with less data.

Dynamic pricing

While price personalization is still not one of the most common applications of e-commerce personalization, it is rising in popularity as 17% of companies who were not already using it reported plans to implement dynamic pricing in 2021. 

The practice of personalizing prices on the basis of purchase history, browsing behavior, and other data points has the potential for a major boost to revenue. 

But while no customers will balk at receiving a special discount, dynamic pricing does carry the risk of angering customers who feel like they are being charged more than others. 

Businesses who decide to try it out should tread carefully, but price personalization certainly has a lot of potentials. 

Wrapping up

When it comes to e-commerce, personalization is the way forward. It proves to have a number of major benefits for businesses, among them, increasing sales and maintaining market share and relevancy as digital transformation quickly ushers us into a personalized future. 

Successfully implementing personalization into your e-commerce business requires a lot of research, trial-and-error, strategy, and analyses. 

This means the next natural step after implementing eCommerce personalization is to understand how to put all this data into action. And this is what our product performance analysis guide is here to do.

How Brand Equity Can Positively Impact Your Business and Drive Growth

Brand equity is the ability to be recognized and acknowledged as more than simply another face in the crowd. Some brands have it, and even fewer know how to build it. With time and effort, you can learn how to become a master of brand equity, similar to giants like Apple & Microsoft. Your Journey Starts Here.

Brand equity is a great tool to have in today’s ever-changing competitive markets. 

The main benefit of having strong brand equity is that consumers will continue considering your products even when the cost is high. 

Consumers perceive them as having innate value or quality solely because they associate it with your brand.

Being the top brand whenever consumers think of your market sector is the ideal position, but it’s not quite that straightforward. 

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola, Apple vs. Microsoft feuds, etc. No one side can claim to truly be at the top of the market, despite all having strong brand equity.

Still, it’s a great position to be in. 

In this guide, we’ll take you through the steps of creating strong brand equity, allowing you to dominate the conversation. 

Let’s begin with the basics.

What is brand equity?

The definition of brand equity is a brand’s perceived value according to consumers. It can also be defined as the level of positive feelings that consumers have about a brand when compared to others in the same market space.

For example, if you order a rum and coke at a bar, you might be asked if Pepsi is okay. Some would answer yes, some no — that’s brand equity. If you buy a new gaming console and are dead set on having a PlayStation? You guessed it, that’s brand equity once again.

Some brands even dominate the market to the point where their name becomes the commonly used word for the item they produce. 

Coca-Cola and Sellotape, for example, have become synonymous with their markets, despite being only one among dozens of brands. That’s strong brand equity at work.

If you have strong brand equity, you have a dedicated customer base and the option to charge premium prices. 

When launching a new product, you’re guaranteed to get customers’ interest no matter what it is. 

That said, you can’t coast by on brand equity alone. You must ensure your products are still top-quality and are within the market’s expectations. Microsoft learned that the hard way with Windows Vista and even Sony with the $600 PlayStation 3.

Keller’s brand equity model (aka brand equity pyramid model)

It’s worth mentioning the Keller Brand Equity model here. We won’t cover it in too much detail as that would be an article in and of itself, but let’s go over it to give you a general idea.

Keller’s brand equity pyramid model states that to gain strong brand equity, you need to shape the way your customers think and feel about you. 

This starts at the base level with establishing your brand identity, then works its way up the pyramid by asking questions about what your brand might want to achieve.

It’s a step-by-step process that makes thinking about how you plan to position yourself and what feelings you want to evoke in your customers. 

Each stage contains crucial components that evoke brand loyalty, so be sure to give it a look if you want to build your brand up to the next level.

The impact of brand equity on customer interactions

Now that you know what brand equity is, you might be asking yourself – “is it worth it?”

It’s true that building brand equity is a long and difficult process, but the results are well worth it. 

Let’s take a look at some of the most tangible benefits, ones that you can point to when an investor asks why you’re putting so much effort into building your brand’s equity.

Customer spending

Brand equity impacts customer spending in two main ways. 

First of all, if you have a high brand equity you can charge more for a product than you otherwise might. In fact, it’s often expected of you to do that. So much so consumers will become suspicious of a product line if you don’t. 

When was the last time you saw a new iPhone going for less than $1,000? It would seem suspicious if it did, right? That’s Apple’s brand equity at work.

The second way in which customer spending is impacted is in making decisions about what to buy, especially in cases where a customer has little knowledge of the products in that market sector.

When a not technologically aligned parent decides to buy their child a simple phone for calls and texts, they’re left to rely on what little they know about a brand’s reputation.

What do they pick? An obscure and niche phone with specific uses? Or a well-known brand such as Apple or Samsung that they’ve probably heard of in passing? Probably the latter, right?

That’s brand equity in action. 

Customer loyalty & advocacy

I’m sure you’ve come across a friend or acquaintance who buys only from a specific brand and won’t accept replacements. I mean, what other laptop could replace my trusty Macbook?

I’ve grown to love it and how it functions so much, that buying another Macbook when it’s time to replace it is a no-brainer. And there are millions like me.

That’s the epitome of customer loyalty, which is different from customer retention (coming up in a few paragraphs).

Customer advocacy is when that loyalty is taken one step further. 

In essence, the customer becomes someone who will promote your brand to their friends and acquaintances, sometimes to the point of convincing them to switch brands.

Brand equity is of great help here. Not only do customers have a much easier time advocating for a brand that is well known, but the actual process of loyalty can be sped up tremendously.

Customer loyalty relies on great experiences, that’s true, but the opinions of others also matter. A HubSpot study on the topic found that 81% of consumers would rely on referrals from friends and family to choose & try a brand over an advertisement. This means that you’ll likely need a recommendation simply to get on the customer loyalty ladder in the first place!

Having strong brand equity means that people are more open to trusting you from the get-go, which makes climbing that ladder from customer to loyal customer to brand advocate that much quicker.

Customer retention

Your customer retention rates are one of the key metrics that help your business keep going. After all, if your customers leave unsatisfied and don’t return it’ll hurt your performance in the long run. A mere 5% increase in your retention rates can bring up to a 25% increase in profits!

Your churn rate, or the rate at which you lose customers over time, is another measure that’s similar to customer retention, just in the opposite direction.

It’s calculated by taking the number of customers who stopped interacting with you over a set period of time and dividing it by the number of customers you had at the start of the time period, then converting it into a percentage.

If your churn rate is high, your customer retention rate is low. Churn is often a more useful metric to look at than retention since it’s more directly comparable over different periods of time.

So, what does brand equity have to do with customer retention? After all, retention rates are solely about customer experience, right? Well, not entirely.

Research has shown that customers care about more than simply their experiences with you, with 80% being willing to change brands based on “a company’s social responsibility, inclusiveness, and/or environmental impact.” How does news on these topics spread? Via brand equity of course.

An apt metaphor to describe this would be meeting someone for the first time. Consider what would happen in the following circumstances.

You meet someone who is clearly in a bad mood, is rude to you, and snaps over minor things. You’d feel insulted, maybe even a little scared. You mark this person in your brain as bad news, and won’t want to deal with them again.

You then tell people that you know about this encounter, and how you felt. They have met this person before and reassure you that they aren’t normally like this, that it must have been a bad day or something similar. 

From this, you decide to revise your opinion, and the next interaction you have with them is great! Clearly, it was just an off day and they’re not normally like this. 

Having strong brand equity keeps customers coming back to you, even when they’ve had one bad experience. 

It’s a sense of trust that the consumer population as a whole has with you, which means that individuals are willing to give you another shot even when they didn’t like what you had to offer the first time around. 

Brand equity’s impact on your internal workings

Brand equity doesn’t just impact your dealings with customers, rather it shapes the very way your business will operate. 

There are plenty of strategies and tactics that big brands with strong brand equity can use that smaller, less well-known ones cannot. 

One example that springs to mind is the TV show Rick and Morty, which premiered its third season completely unannounced back in 2017. 

Any other television show would spend time hyping up a new release, using advertisements, press releases, and other means to keep the buzz going. 

Rick and Morty’s strong brand equity meant that it didn’t need to do that in order to keep viewers engaged.

There are more internal benefits to having strong brand equity than pickles and portals. Here are a few.

Stock prices

Stock prices are a great indicator of how your business is doing. Of course, this is only applicable if you actually have them up for sale, but let’s go over them briefly anyway. If this isn’t relevant to you, feel free to skip to the next section.

Strong brand equity will increase your stock prices, as it brings with it the expectation that the brand will continue to perform well. This in turn can also increase your brand equity in a feedback loop, though there is a limit to it.

So, why are stock prices important? Well, they’re an indicator of how well your brand is doing in its market, as well as a status symbol that can open doors to you that would otherwise be closed.

Higher stock prices are also attractive to investors who will continue to put funding into your brand if they think it’s going to give them a good return on investment.

Easy expansion of product lines

Creating new product lines is never easy, however with brand equity you can make the process a bit smoother.

Imagine a completely unknown business releasing a new line of soda drinks. They’re unusual flavors that haven’t really been tried before, and overall the public seems uncertain. Would you buy that drink, or would you avoid it for your regular soda?

Now, let’s flip the circumstances. Let’s say that Coca-Cola releases lots of new and unusual flavors. You know the brand, and know what they usually make is considered good quality, so you’re more likely than not to try it out at least once.

There is actually a great real-world example of this with Walkers, the UK-based potato chip company that regularly comes out with absurd flavors such as Breakfast, Fish & Chips, and even Squirrel! That’s not a joke, they actually did this.

Thanks to their strong brand equity, Walkers have been able to turn their experimental product lines into a game of sorts, with the most popular limited-time flavor being kept and turned into a regular product. 

Not only did the public do their research for them, but they actively engaged with their product testing and expansion. 

Imagine a no-name brand releasing these flavors, they’d likely be considered a joke. That’s what brand equity is truly capable of doing! 

Greater influence on the market as a whole

Strong brand names bring with them a sense of dominance. 

With strong brand equity, you’ll be able to negotiate with others from a position of power rather than equal footing or from a position of weakness.

With this position at the negotiating table comes opportunity. Partnerships, sponsorship deals, and collaborations, all these are possible only if you have a strong bargaining position. 

You also open yourself up to greater investment potential and maybe even get better deals from your suppliers once you’ve made a name for yourself.

Five ways of measuring brand equity

Alas, measuring brand equity isn’t straightforward. There are many factors to consider, and which one you put weight on will depend on your business model, industry, etc. 

Further, brand equity isn’t something you can measure in cold numbers. Still, there are a few tried and tested brand equity analytics you can use. We’ve laid out five of them below for your consideration.

Competitive analysis

Competitive metrics set you up against your competitors and see how you’re doing compared to them. 

It’s a more aggressive form of analysis that takes their marketing campaigns and yours, sees their results, and tells you how well you’re doing in comparison. If your competitors are lagging, that means you’re leading, and vice-versa.

Other factors you can look at to compare brands include relative customer sentiment, acquisition rates, social media engagement, etc. 

Remember though, just because your competitors are below now doesn’t mean you can relax. They’ll be looking for ways to improve just as you are, and if you stop to watch, you’ll be left behind!

Financial data

Another metric you can use to measure brand equity is financial data. 

Market share, profits, revenues, prices – these all tie into how well your brand is doing, since more brand equity correlates with more customers. Compare these to those of previous years or quarters, and you’ll be able to measure brand equity data over time.

Customer lifetime value is another strong indicator. 

Essentially it’s the value that a customer brings to you during the entirety of their total interactions with you. 

CLV = Average purchase price Average purchase rate Average customer lifetime

Strong brand equity correlates to higher CLV since loyal customers will bring in more revenue for you overall. Conversely, if you need to keep re-attracting customers, it might end up lowering their overall value to you since acquiring a customer is more costly than keeping a current one.

Also worth mentioning is the cost of acquiring new customers, which is a huge indicator of brand equity.

If said cost is high, it means that it takes a lot of incentive for a consumer to switch from a competing brand to yours, meaning your brand equity is low, and you need to work on your image.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is another abstract quality that’s hard to measure, but nevertheless, it’s very valuable when you’re looking at your brand equity. 

To put it simply, if consumers don’t know about you, then they won’t buy from you. Further, if they know of you only vaguely, you won’t be their first thought when looking for a product.

Having high brand awareness means that you’re synonymous with the market you’re in – like the examples of Coca-Cola and Sellotape mentioned earlier. 

Being so well known comes with certain risks to your brand, as you lose copyright on any name that becomes the commonly used term for an item, but it’s a definite sign that you’re well up there in people’s minds. 

Coca-Cola managed to retain its trademark since the commonly used term is the nickname Coke. Sellotape, However, lost theirs when the term was deemed genericized enough.

Ways you can measure brand awareness include:

  • Surveys.
  • Store traffic.
  • Search volume.
  • Google search rankings.

These aren’t the end all be all, but they’re a good start. You can also look to social media for hints, but this information will be highly polarized due to the nature of such spaces. 

After all, when would you be more likely to post on social media? After a routine, bog-standard experience, or one that was absolutely awful? 

Customer sentiment

Customer sentiment is about feelings, specifically customers’ feelings towards a particular product or brand, depending how you measure it. 

Customer sentiment is a measure of how strong the emotions associated with your brand are, and how positive or negative they are. 

It’s especially important in today’s markets, as 86% of customers are willing to spend more after a positive experience with a brand.

Generally, customer sentiment is generated by surveys or similar methods, asking customers to rank their experiences based on how they felt about their interactions with you. 

However, it can also be found by scraping review data with sentiment analysis or analyzing social media chatter. 

It’s not straightforward at all to measure customer sentiment, and you may need to use specialized platform like Sentimate to analyze the data for you.

Brand audits

Something to consider when you’re analyzing your brand’s equity is what’s the total value of the brand itself, or what it contributes to the business simply by existing. 

There are a myriad of factors you can measure when doing this, but depending on who you are and what you do some will be more important than others.

In general, things to consider when auditing your brand are:

  • The cost to build the brand. How much money did you pump into advertising, trademarks, etc.?
  • The market value of the brand, or how much value it brings to stamp it on a product. Can you charge more for a branded product compared to a generic equivalent?
  • The income value of the brand, or how much money it brings in by making customers aware of your products. Can you launch a new product and expect high sales, or would you need to put funds into advertisement?

How to build & develop brand equity (with examples)

Brand equity develops in two distinct ways. 

Firstly, there’s the way in which awareness about a particular brand can spread over time from person to person naturally. This is often overlooked as a method of building brand equity as it is a slow process but nevertheless is important.

The second way is to build it yourself, taking action to increase your brand’s visibility, reputation, and relationships with consumers. 

We’ve outlined below the processes by which these two methods take place, as well as how you might go about beginning the latter.

How brand equity develops organically

Brand equity is something you’d ideally want to craft, however, it’s also something that can develop naturally over time. 

Back in the 1950s, for example, they didn’t have the knowledge we do on how brands can build equity for themselves, yet Ford was still considered a top-tier manufacturer of cars. 

This happened because information can spread organically from person to person by word of mouth, which increases brand equity without any input from the brand itself. 

Let’s take a look at the process by which this happens.

Awareness

In the first stage, a consumer becomes aware of your brand’s existence. This can be via spotting products on shelves, seeing advertisements, or simply by word of mouth.

They will have no immediate opinion on them beyond what others might have told them and their immediate gut response to anything of your brand’s image they’ve seen.

At this stage, it’s not likely that a person will buy from you, but a small number of them might do so. If they do, they skip the next step and go straight to the third one.

Recognition

Next, the person in question will come across your brand again. This time they’ll recognize it, and it won’t be completely unknown to them. 

Their prior experience with your brand will add to the current one, forming an opinion. 

This is where good advertisement comes into play, as many potential customers simply gloss over a brand at this stage if it doesn’t catch their eye, forget about it, and do not progress further along in the process.

Trial

In the third step of the process, a consumer will feel comfortable enough with your brand to test one of your products. This might come after coming into contact with your brand just a few times, or it may take longer.

The important part of this step is that the person takes the leap from consumer to customer. They’ve invested money into you, and their opinions will be highly polarized by their experiences with your product or service. 

If the customer likes what you have to offer, it’s likely that they’ll come back. If they don’t, they won’t, and might even badmouth you. This fact is why businesses will often advertise their generic products more, leaving the more niche ones aside as fewer customers would prefer those as their first experience with the brand.

Preference

Next, a customer who has had good experiences with your brand will begin to prefer you to others in the market. This step absolutely requires that you get the previous one right, with most potential advocates straying from the track at this point. 

It’s not enough to simply be good, you see, you have to be better than their previous brand in order to convince them to prefer you. It’s been shown time and again that humans are creatures of habit, and won’t change their habits unless given an incentive to.

In this case, that incentive is a better experience than your competitors provide.

Loyalty

When a customer has had repeated good experiences with a brand, they will not only prefer it but begin to recommend it to others. 

After all, wouldn’t you want your friends to have a good time just like you did?

It’s at this stage that a customer can be considered an advocate for your brand. They will spread information on you to another person, who will then begin this whole process all over again as they’ve just become aware of it.

Advocates don’t just help spread awareness either, their efforts can be seen at every step of the brand equity process. 

  • If you’re aware of a brand but haven’t yet tried it out, someone recommending them to you might convince you to give them a go.
  • If you’ve tried out a brand, but haven’t committed to them, the opinions of others might help sway you.
  • If you’ve tried out a brand, and had a single bad experience, hearing about the good experiences of others might convince you to give them another try.
  • If you have a preference for a brand but aren’t comfortable talking about them to others, seeing another person do so might put you at ease.

Keep in mind, however, that not everybody finishes these steps. Some may simply prefer not to air their opinions so openly, others might simply be stubbornly stuck to their current brands. That’s okay though, not everyone needs to be an advocate in order to spread brand equity!

Building brand equity yourself

Brand equity spreads organically, though this is a slow process. In order to speed things up, there are several things that you can do in order to increase your brand equity artificially.

These factors really dive into the why and how of your brand. Consumers want brands that stand for something, that have a purpose and a meaning behind them. 

You need to have more tangible business goals than simply “be successful and make money”, and they need to be ones that consumers can relate to in order to truly create brand equity.

The sections below aren’t steps per say, but rather overarching guidelines that you should always keep in mind when attempting to build your brand equity. There’s no point at which you can say you’re finished, you should instead be constantly analyzing your brand and the world around it.

Understanding your brand’s drive

The purpose of your brand needs to be clear in order to build strong brand equity. If you take a look at the most prominent brands today, you’ll find that they put their purpose and drive at the forefront of their communications.

That’s not to say that they all have the same messages or goals. Each brand has its own unique approach, meaning you can’t simply copy someone else’s drive if you want to set yourself up as unique.

So, what kind of messages are there? Let’s take a look at two prominent examples in the tech industry – Apple and Microsoft.

Apple

Apple’s stated purpose is to stretch the limits of technology, to create things that no one else can. To that end, they portray themselves as providers of future technology.

Apple’s advertising tends to focus on the brand itself, more than the products, which has allowed them to break away from their initial focus on computers and into phones, tablets, and even TVs.

Overall, Apple’s strategy has been to present itself via dazzling and simplified displays that cling to people’s minds. It’s certainly worked, with their advertisements being some of the most memorable and creative in recent years.

Microsoft

In contrast to Apple, Microsoft portrays itself as reliable, down-to-earth, and hard-working. In other words, similar to your average working Joe. Instead of being a futuristic, out-of-this-world brand that dazzles you, they stick to the practical aspects.

Microsoft positions itself as the good old reliable company that will never let you down, one that keeps working people in mind. 

While certainly less exciting than Apple’s dazzling displays there’s no denying that the straightforward, practical-centered message resonates with a lot of consumers worldwide, resulting in Microsoft’s systems being the most used by far.

Of course, a brand’s drive can change over time.  Markets change, technology evolves, and the needs and desires of consumers change too. A business that aims to provide dial-up internet service would find it extremely difficult to attract customers today, for instance, despite it being a fairly attractive, low-cost option just 20 years ago.

Developing your brand’s message

When you’re creating messages that consumers will encounter, it’s important to make sure that they’ll find them appealing and interesting in order to further engage with you.

In other words, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it too.

The key element of your brand’s message is taking your drive and translating it into real-world problems that consumers face. Specifics and details are extremely important, as consumers are put off by vague wording and ill-defined tones.

So, how do you find out what consumers would relate to? In one word, data.

  • Consumer opinion surveys can tell you directly what worries them.
  • Search traffic is a great indicator of what topics are growing in importance.
  • Social media is a goldmine of opinion data and is searchable and segmentable.
  • Reviews and ratings of similar products or services to yours can give insight into consumer desires.

One thing to keep in mind is that deciding your message isn’t something that you do once and then stick to. As times change, you need to change too, and altering your message in order ot appeal to consumers more is standard practise for most brands.

Driving awareness of your brand

Being aware of a band means more than acknowledging its existence. You want customers to understand both what you stand for and how you plan to uphold your values.

Awareness comes with long-term strategies, and taking actions that align with your values. It’s a trust factor, one which will only come after you’ve demonstrated your commitment to upholding the values you’ve stated.

The most important thing you can do with your awareness strategies is to be consistent. Consumers connect the most with brands that they can form emotional bonds with, which onloy happens if that brand is consistent in its ways. You’ll get more out of long-term, loyal customers than you ever would by simply partaking in one-and-done sales.

In short, focus on the broader future of your brand instead of simply the next transaction. While you might profit in the short term, you’ll lose out in the long run.

Maintaining consistency & transparency

Once you’ve established your brand, don’t change it unless you have to.

This might seem completely opposed to everything we’ve spoken about in the previous few sections but bear with us here.

When we say keep your brand the same, what we mean is the personality and tone behind your brand needs to remain consistent in order for customers to continue to relate to you.

While there have been a few instances of brands radically altering their image in order to refresh themselves – see Savage Wendys – it’s generally better to maintain your image.

If you do pivot, make sure to stay consistent. Wendy’s has been roasting ordinary people and antagonizing their competition on Twitter for over half a decade now, and has become something of a sensation.

The customers that you retain tend to do so because they relate to you and your brand. If you wipe the slate clean, you’ll have to re-acquire loyalty from them all over again.

Sometimes, newer isn’t always better. Then again, that’s up to you to decide.

Customer experience

Customers are at the heart of brand equity. News can travel faster than ever in the age of the internet, and bad news always seems to spread the fastest.

The solution? Simply providing a good customer experience.

Brands aren’t defined just by what they do anymore, they’re also known for how they do it. Unless being rude to your customers is part of your appeal, and yes, there are actually businesses that do this, you need to put great customer experience at the heart of your brand.

Social media is a great place to let customers air their praises and grievances to you. By taking note of the former you can continue to provide great experiences in the future, and by responding to the latter you’ll be potentially turning a negative into a positive. Almost all brands, even smaller, local ones, have some kind of social media presence.

An often overlooked way to gain insight into what kind of experience your customers want with you is simply to ask them. While it’s not always possible to get real-time feedback, asking your customers how you did at the end of each interaction can get you detailed information on how your strategies are working.

At the end of the day, the customer is king – at least when it comes to brand equity, anyway.

Real-life examples of building brand equity

All this talk of brand equity sounds very impressive, but you might be wondering – if it’s all hypothetical, nothing guaranteed, what’s the point of it? 

Well, we’ve gathered below some real-life examples of how brand equity was built, as well as the lessons you can learn from them.

Maggi

You might know Maggi as a provider of cheap, filling instant noodle snacks. What you might not know is that they were banned in India in 2015, after regulators determined that their products weren’t as free of MSG as they claimed, and even contained lead!

The validity of these tests was later called into question, but you’d expect there to be some damage to their reputation … right?

Despite the fact that these noodles were banned in the entire country of India for almost six months, and that production had been halted during this time, there was still an enormous demand from the Indian population for their one-pot snacks.

So, why is this?

Well, Maggi’s success was in adapting to the culture present in India. In quite a few nations, offering noodles as an alternative to rice would be seen as sensible, however in India, the idea of “rice for dinner” is so ingrained (no pun intended) that they needed to try a different strategy.

Instead, they advertised their noodles as an afternoon snack, something that could be made and eaten quickly by those in a rush – for instance, parents who needed to feed their children quickly after school.

In essence, Maggi offered itself as an “in-between” option and did so with great success. The convenience of their products meant that even after a scandal that halted sales for six months, many households still returned to consuming them almost immediately.

The lesson here? Adapt yourself to the demands of the market you find yourself in.

Netflix

Netflix is a huge success story when it comes to brand equity. Once they were nothing but another video rental company, now they’re synonymous with online streaming services. 

They’ve even entered our casual vocabulary as a verb … to Netflix and chill. 😉

Netflix was able to build its brand equity by being one of the first organizations out there to expand into what it’s now known for – streaming services.

In fact, I’d bet that a few of you reading this don’t even know that it did anything else before streaming.

Netflix was in the right place at the right time to begin the streaming revolution, launching its platform in 2008. It may not have been the first streaming service, but it was definitely the first major one.

Why was this the case? Well, they were already established as a video rental company at the time. 

With the rise of the internet, Netflix saw that they had an opportunity to expand their services. Eventually, as their streaming service gained momentum, they turned it into their primary source of revenue.

Today, Netflix no longer offers video & DVD rentals.

The lesson here? Adapt your brand’s strategy and identity to changing times.

Conclusion

Hopefully, after reading this guide you’ll know a little more about brand equity – what it is, how it’s grown, and how it’s maintained.

Brand equity requires knowing your brand, and knowing what your brand’s greater purpose in the world is. That’s a big question to ask, and a lot of brands can’t even boast of having one.

By having a purpose, a message, and the means to spread awareness of these, you can propel your brand to great heights. People naturally seek purpose in life and align themselves with those brands that hold values they can understand and empathize with. 

It’s not entirely out there to say that these purposes sometimes matter more to them than the products & services that these brands provide. 

Take a deep breath, and ask yourself – what is our brand’s purpose? What can we do to make sure this purpose is fulfilled? Do that, and you’re on the right track to having brand equity for yourself.

How Competitive Intelligence Lets You Stay Ahead of Your Rivals

Businesses don’t exist in a bubble. Competitors always try new tactics to gain market share, leaving you behind. That’s why performing competitive intelligence isn’t optional these days but a must. This guide will walk you through the details of competitive intelligence, from basic definitions to actionable strategies explaining how to perform it and gain the upper hand.

 

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a baseball player who’s up to bat.

You’ve no idea what pitch the pitcher is going to throw.

You’ve got no clue where the catchers are planning to move to.

All you can do is make your best guess, right?

Well, not exactly. Each pitcher has their preferred throws, and there’s a good chance they’ll use one that they think you’re weak to. If you prepare for such a pitch, you’re more likely to score a home run ????. 

In a way, the world of business is just like the game of baseball. Being able to predict what’s going to happen next will give you a huge advantage. You’ll be able to see your competitors’ latest moves to try and squeeze you out of the market and counteract them.

That, quite simply, is competitive intelligence. 

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is data collection and analysis by your organization on its competitors. This is done using openly-available sources, such as:

  • Press releases.
  • Patent filings.
  • Whitepapers. 
  • And more, which we’ll cover later on.

Public companies are much easier to gather data on, as they are lawfully required to publish their quarterly earnings. Private companies are a little bit more difficult to examine, but there are methods you can use. Legal ones, that is.

Competitive intelligence vs. industrial spying

When we say competitive intelligence, you might think that you’ll be aiming right for the target and getting ahold of your competitors’ strategies directly. 

This is not actually the case.

You see, competitive intelligence is done legally

Every business has a right to keep its inner workings a secret, especially concerning its information. Stealing that information is highly illegal as it would involve either breach of contract or hacking into their servers.

Information gathered illegally can, of course, be used to make decisions, but that’s not competitive intelligence – it’s industrial espionage, which we strongly discourage.

How do you get competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence has many sources.

Which ones you turn to will largely depend on your intentions when performing your research. Nevertheless, all of them can provide valuable data if analyzed correctly.

Blog content

The content that your competitors write about on their blogs is a gold mine of information. Not only does it tell you what type of consumer they’re hoping to attract, but how they’re hoping to attract them.

Just like our blog, you’ll find a variety of topics based around the general market that your rivals are in being written and posted. Some of them might seem to have little relevance, but when you analyze them fully, you’ll find ways in which they link back to your competitors’ game plans.

We wouldn’t be writing about competitive intelligence here at Revuze if our software couldn’t help in that regard, now would we? Our AI can help you obtain competitive intelligence in real-time, so feel free to book a demo if you’d like to learn more.

Social media

Social media often has a news component for businesses, whereby they keep their stakeholders updated with their new and ongoing dealings.

Thanks to this, they’re prime information sources. New product launches, new deals, and customer responses, you can find a lot of data on these platforms.

You might think that a lot of social media information can only be used in reactive responses rather than proactively, and in a sense, you’re both right and wrong. 

You can only respond to each individual piece of information, however, they may reveal a trend that shows your competition’s ongoing strategies.

Take, for instance, the example below from Nestle.

Taken individually, each advertisement gives off a different message. The first one showcases the benefits of plant-based food, the second promotes involving children in your cooking.

When looked at together, they tell a different story. Nestle is promoting healthy eating, presumably because they want to boost sales of their healthy eating product lines. This is a bold new direction for a company known mostly for its chocolate and confectionary sales.

Reviews & feedback

Whenever your rivals launch new products or services, the first thing you should look at is their reviews. 

Not only will they give you insight into what your competition is trying to achieve, but they’ll tell you the audience’s response to it.

There’s no use creating the perfect egg scrambler if your customers want their eggs fried, after all.

Reviews are useful for existing products too, with any changes reflected in the feedback they receive. 

Job boards

While not the most intuitive of places to look, job boards can nevertheless be a valuable source of information.

Imagine for a second that your main rival has suddenly posted a lot of job openings in their R&D department. This is pretty unusual since they typically have a low personnel turnover rate.

So what’s going on? Well, there are several options:

  • They’re looking to expand their R&D department permanently.
  • They’re starting an experimental project which they aren’t sure will succeed.
  • They’re feeling behind on their research and want to hire more staff to catch up.

In the case of the first option, the job listings would be permanent posts. In the case of the other two, they’d likely be temporary. 

The second option might also be listed as “temporary with a possibility of becoming permanent.”

Just like that, simply by keeping an eye on the job boards, you’ve gained valuable information on what your rival is up to.

Financial statements

As mentioned previously, public companies have to release their financial statements quarterly. With this data in hand, you can see:

  • Where they’re earning the most money, in essence, what areas they rely on.
  • Where they’re earning more money than last quarter, therefore growing their operations.
  • Where they’re investing their money, what they’re buying, and what they’re not.
  • Which strategies of theirs are working, and which aren’t.

Press releases

Business news is absolutely full of valuable information. There will be announcements about new products, new hires, expansion moves, and more.

Some businesses even have a News section on their websites or apps, which coalesces all this information in one place.

Local information

If you’re part of an industry that has brick-and-mortar stores, you can look at the local information surrounding said stores in order to gather information.

What times do your competitors open and close? What area of the town or city are they located in? Do they have a decent amount of floor space dedicated to customers? Do they keep their stock on hand in a back room or a nearby warehouse?

All these little details can tell you what might and might not work in your own stores. Of course, copying your rivals exactly isn’t ideal as they might be constrained by circumstances and not able to operate as they would ideally, but it’s a start.

Legal papers

You can look at legal papers filed by your competitors as they are typically publicly viewable. 

For instance, a planning permission request for a large industrial building would indicate that your competitor plans to build a new manufacturing plant or similar establishment.

This tells you that your competitor is trying to expand their manufacturing processes, and if it’s in a new location, you can assume that they’re trying to expand into a new market.

Another great source of information is patent filings. These will tell you not only what your competition is doing but what they plan to make legally exclusive. 

It’s sometimes said that there’s not an original thought under the sun that someone hasn’t already had at one point. That’s true in R&D as well. 

You might have to end up abandoning your projects or adjusting them not to break copyright law if your competitors patent what you’ve been working on.

Industry conferences

Conferences are similar to news reports, except more detailed. They’re designed to showcase all of the best aspects of a business to others within their industry, whether that’s to attract new customers or collect new talent.

Conferences are often the most detailed sources of information on this list, and that’s for one simple reason. You can actually talk to participants and get their opinions and perspectives.

All news, legal papers, and social network content are heavily moderated by those who release the information. When talking to someone face to face, you can often get far more information.

The downside is the unorganized nature of gathering data at conferences. You also have to factor in the ability to get to the conference, accommodation, etc. 

So are conferences worth it to attend? It’s up to you, but we’d say definitely. The rise of virtual conferences is also making attendance easier, so keep an eye out for these opportunities.

What are the goals of competitive intelligence?

So, you might be thinking, why use competitive intelligence? 

If it’s all indirect information, is it really going to give me an accurate picture of what my competition is up to?

Competitive intelligence is akin to following footprints in the sand. You might not be there to see the person walk it, but you can see which direction they’re going in, and when they shift or double back on themselves.

You can infer a great deal from indirect information. If you want an example from history, look no further than when Kodak accidentally discovered the Manhattan Project, simply by noticing that they were getting reports of radioactively-contaminated film in the area around the test site.

Anticipating your competitor’s moves

“Know thy enemy, and know thyself,” said Sun Tzu in the Art of War.

While not quite a battle between armies, business is no less competitive. If you know your rivals’ moves before they begin, you will be able to counter them with great effect.

Let’s say that both you and your competitor are in the e-commerce business. 

You know from experience that your competitor has put on a Black Friday sale every year, thus you can anticipate that they’ll do the same this year and develop a strategy that accounts for this.

There’s also the option to take a look at their past sales, as well as current hot items, which will give you a clue as to which products they might put on sale this year. If you know which categories they plan to target, you can sidestep or counteract them.

All in all, the best way to counter an opponent’s strategy is to never let it get off the ground in the first place.

Driving your innovation

You always need innovation in order to keep your business fresh and on top of things. This goes doubly so for those dealing with the ecommerce market, where trends and habits change faster than anywhere else.

Competitive intelligence can uncover what it is that your competition has, but more importantly, it can also reveal what they lack and what consumers are after. No one can cover all bases, after all, and by keeping an eye on new opportunities, you can really get ahead in the game.

Keeping track of market conditions

Markets change, and you need to change with them in order to survive.

One of the greatest examples of decision-making in business is Netflix, which in 2007 launched a streaming service alongside its video rental one. This proved a huge hit and allowed Netflix to become the giant that it is today.

Netflix saw which way the wind was blowing as music consumers turned more and more to digital media and decided to follow it. It allowed them to survive a major upheaval in the industry, which many, including Blockbuster, did not. 

Netflix’s changes showcase a great example of strategic intelligence in action. Video rental was still popular back in 2007, after all, and they could simply have stuck to it. 

Instead, they took account of trends that showed a shift towards online streaming and were able to adapt and weather the storm. 

Blockbuster, on the other hand, continued to have faith in their traditional methods and failed to take into account the long-term implications. There’s only one Blockbuster left in the US now, and for a good reason.

Growing your brand to customer expectations

Times change, and so do people. Nobody would say that applying the same business tactics that worked in the 1950s is appropriate in today’s world, but few realize just how fast expectations can change in the age of the internet.

This is something that e-commerce-based businesses especially need to be aware of, what with the internet being an ever-evolving pace. 

Payment options, fonts and colors, images – especially if you try to use internet humor to sell your brand – links and plugins, all these can have a massive effect on your ability to sell. 

If you use unusual plugins, for instance, you’ll turn off most customers who won’t want to install one to use your store. 

If you’re given the option between two sites, one of which requires you to download extra features to use while the other is free of such inconveniences, which would you choose to use?

Links can also break or be archived over time, meaning what worked perfectly one day won’t the next. Relying on other websites to grant information is a tricky business.

If a certain brand that you’re displaying prominently has bad press, you may want to decrease its visibility on your store lest you get a bad reputation by association. Conversely, you can increase the visibility of other brands that have a surge in popularity.

Competitive intelligence will help here, telling you what customers expect from you and what you need to do in order to meet those expectations. 

A good example of growth meeting customer expectations is Amazon’s adoption of Venmo as a payment option, allowing those who don’t want to use their bank accounts directly a more secure way to pay.

Credit and debit card fraud has been on the rise over the past few years, making more and more consumers wary of using their cards online. 

When using Venmo, your bank information is never directly given to the vendor, meaning that phishing attacks or breaches in Amazon’s security are unlikely to put consumer data at risk.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how fast brands needed to be able to change to survive, with plenty of businesses not making it through 2020 intact. 

While not exactly a typical event where markets are concerned, it does nevertheless highlight how much circumstances can change in short periods of time.

Knowing your position within the market

Another great example of where competitive intelligence can help you is in finding your market position. 

You see, it isn’t always obvious from sales figures and other such indirect data exactly where you stand nor how you are perceived by the consumer base.

Data sources such as reviews, ratings, etc., can give you an insight into the consumers’ minds and how they perceive your brand, letting you assess your standing. 

Are you seen as a first-pick, top-rate seller? Are you just a reliable alternative when the usual options aren’t available? Or are you seen as someone niche who fulfills specific demands that only a few consumers would have?

By using this information and comparing it to your strategies, you can see if you’ve achieved your targeted market position. If you have, great! If not, you’ll gain insight into why this is the case and how you might resolve that in the future. 

Remember, Spotify was able to alter its position from merely a simple music player to a content creation platform in just a few years, proving that anything is possible if you have the right intelligence.

Staying ahead of your rivals

Let’s go back to the baseball metaphor. Your biggest rival has started upping their game by purchasing new players specifically to beat you. 

You can’t stop them from doing this as the people selling the players aren’t going to stop just because you ask nicely. So, what can you do?

Well, there are several ways in which you can undermine them, all above board.

For starters, you can either coach your team in strategies that counteract theirs, or you can hire new players yourself to counteract their changes. 

If one pitcher they obtain is known for their difficult-to-hit fastballs, you can hire a hitter who’s known for being able to knock them out of the park.

Secondly, you can put in bids yourself. 

Not only can you stop your rival from obtaining certain players that way, but by entering into bidding wars with them, you can potentially limit the number of players they can buy. 

An organization only has so much money to throw around, after all.

Following on from that, if you take a look at their team and the players they’re placing bids on, you might be able to see dazzling combinations that would work very well together and disrupt them. 

For instance, if you split up a pitcher-catcher combination that is known for doing great together, you can disrupt their seamless play by having their players have to adjust to each other.

In short, just because your competition plans for something to happen doesn’t mean that they will be able to pull it off.

Helping decision making

Finally, we get to the main point that underlies most use of competitive intelligence, that it helps you decide what to do next.

All of the previous examples we’ve mentioned today allow you to make better choices, ultimately helping you make data-driven decisions that will elevate you in the market. 

The more information you have, the better a decision you will be able to make.

If the British had known that Washington planned to cross the Delaware, they wouldn’t have simply let him slip through their fingers. 

Knowledge is power and some would say knowing your competitors is a superpower.

Types of competitive intelligence

Now that we’ve mentioned why you want to use competitive intelligence, it’s time to take a look at what it is in more depth. 

We’ll start by defining the two types, strategic and tactical.

Strategic intelligence

Strategic intelligence is all about long-term thinking. It’s information that could affect the business’ direction over long periods of time. 

This type of intelligence isn’t something that you need to worry about right away. However, you shouldn’t let yourself be lulled into a false sense of security.

Some examples of strategic intelligence include how consumers use the internet, for instance, which social media sites they use, which plugins are considered essential, and which browsers are in favor. 

Tactical intelligence

Tactical intelligence deals with things that alter your plans in the short term.

This type of intelligence demands an immediate response if you’re going to act on it, and in some cases, you may have to act without having the complete picture. 

That said, you shouldn’t let that stop you from making a decision. 

In business, it’s often best to make a decision with the information that you currently have rather than miss the opportunity.

Examples of tactical intelligence include new product launches by competitors, new government regulations being introduced, new stores being opened in your area, and disrupted supply chains due to road accidents.

How do you perform competitive intelligence analysis?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably convinced that competitive intelligence is the right type of analysis for you. 

So, how do you go about performing it? We’ve laid out the seven crucial steps below that will assist you in undertaking your analysis.

Decide what you want to achieve

The first step, as with many a project, is to determine what exactly it is that you want to achieve with this analysis.

Do you want to know your position within the market? Perhaps you’d like more information on what your rivals are up to? Or maybe you’d like to scour the market for a gap that you can fill?

Your aims will determine everything, from your information sources to your analysis methods. If you don’t make a firm decision here, you’ll be floundering about during the entire process.

Remember, your business will likely have several different markets that it stretches into. By segmenting your analysis into different sections for each market, you’ll be able to collect data that’s relevant to each without muddying the waters.

The narrower your field, the more precise your information will be.

Identify your competitors

Once you know what you aim to achieve, you can then identify your competitors. These are those businesses who are:

  • Within your market.
  • Selling similar products.
  • Aiming to appeal to the same audience.
  • Able to take away your customers.

This is a fairly straightforward step in most cases since you can simply look at who is selling similar products or services to you. The more similar these are, the more they are a direct competitor.

Determine the data you need to collect

Now that you know what information you want to find, and who you want to find it on, it’s time to determine what data will showcase that information.

Are you looking for information on new products that your rivals are launching? Look to reviews, your rivals’ websites, and unboxing videos.

Do you want to know what your competition is up to with their advertising? You need to look at their campaigns and observe the trends.

You can be more specific too, splitting advertisement into online and offline, email and social media, etc. Remember, the more segmented the data, the more precisely you can guess your opponents’ moves.

Find your data sources

Once you’ve determined the data you want to collect, you can pick your data sources. 

Products? Find their reviews, look at their product showcases, and check out the product’s sentiment via sentiment analysis

You can even go so far as to buy one of their products for more direct comparison and testing, and maybe find a way to get an edge that way.

Pricing strategies? Take a look at price trends offered by Amazon, at past offers and pamphlets, and compare them to your own.

SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs will give you detailed information on a variety of topics, as they’ll easily be able to show you which keywords your competitors are aiming to rank strongly in. 

If you know where they’re trying to appear in Google searches, you’ll know what kind of customers they’re aiming to attract.

Analyze your data

Next up is data analysis. There are plenty of methods to choose from, some involving software and some involving doing the number crunching yourself. 

Some examples include but aren’t limited to:

  • Porter’s Five Forces.
  • Driving Forces Analysis.
  • Product Life Cycles.
  • Porters Four Corners.
  • SWOT Analysis.

Remember, while computers might be all the rage, they’re a little lacking when it comes to the emotional side of things. 

Sometimes you can simply look at the information you’re presented with and come to a better conclusion than a computer could ever reach.

Convert your analysis into plans of action

Now that you’ve gained your information, it’s time to convert it into plans of action. Or rather, factor it into your existing plans to make them better.

To take the previous baseball metaphor, you need to adjust your stance once you’ve deduced what pitch you’re about to face. In the case of business, however, the pitch is anything that can alter the ideal outcome of your plans.

The direction that you take is extremely dependent on your situation, so for the most part it’s up to you. Your intuition and experience can be excellent tools here, allowing you to see solutions that wouldn’t ordinarily be obvious.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

Competitive intelligence isn’t just a one-and-done type of deal. Your strategies change, so why shouldn’t your competitors do the same? 

Competitive intelligence should be a regular habit that you indulge in, not a one-off project. 

After all, markets are volatile, consumer expectations change, and you need to be aware of all of this if you want to get ahead in the game.

When should you perform competitive intelligence analysis?

As we’ve previously mentioned, competitive intelligence analysis is something that’s ideally done whenever possible. 

However, there are a few specific times in your business’s life cycle that you definitely need to be performing it.

Let’s take a look at some of the best points in time when you can be undertaking this.

When you’re starting out

Analyzing your competition should be one of the first things you do when you’re planning to start a business. Knowing who you’re up against, what they do, and how they do it is crucial to staying competitive.

Understanding the industry you’re in will tell you a great deal about how you should operate. 

Is the market saturated with brands that seem indistinguishable? You’ll need to stand out by having a feature that’s unique. 

Shopify, for instance, saw the world of ecommerce and decided to create a platform for small businesses to create their own customized online stores easily, rather than having to rely on pre-existing platforms that would limit their design abilities.

Your investors will want to know about the surrounding market too since it gives them an insight into how well you’re likely to perform and how risky an investment you are. 

Very few businesses can get off the ground without funding, so this is a top priority.

When you’re developing & launching a new product

William Henry Perkin isn’t likely a name that you know, since he lived in the 1800s. In short, he’s best known for creating the first cheap purple dye, which until those times had been limited to the extremely rich due to the cost of its production.

He also created a red dye in 1869. However, another company beat him to the punch in patenting it by just a single day! 

This showcases why you need to perform competitive intelligence both when developing and launching a new product – your rivals might be thinking along similar lines and get their product out before yours, at which point you may have to abandon the entire project due to patenting.

When you’re considering a change in market strategy

Change comes to us all, whether we like it or not. A crucial part of planning for change is analyzing the current market in order to assess whether or not your planned changes will be effective.

One of the most important parts of this is analyzing your competitors in order to make sure they’re not planning the same as you. 

After all, it’s no good to plan a pivot that makes you stand out only for your competition to take the same direction. 

When you’re seeing a drop in physical business activity

When business stagnates, there isn’t always an obvious reason why meaning you need to look deeper to find the source of your problems.

Of course, foot traffic and physical sales can decrease for reasons other than your competition, but by analyzing them, you can see whether they are stealing your customers or if there’s a bigger problem that you all are facing.

Are you all seeing a drop in foot traffic, but only within a specific area of your city? It’s probably a transportation issue that prevents customers from being able to reach you easily.

Maybe some of your competitors are seeing a boom, whereas others are seeing a bust also. There will be some correlating reasons as to why specific businesses are more attractive right now compared to others, and you will be able to find them.

Maybe everyone sees a drop in business activity. This points to a drop in consumer confidence, indicating that you should be prepared for them to spend less and spend only on products they really desire.

All this information adds up to an edge that lets you see where consumers are engaging with businesses and, more importantly, why. This enables you to adjust your approach and meet their expectations.

When you’re seeing a drop in online traffic

Getting hits on your website is crucial to ecommerce, and a big part of this is search engine optimization to account for organic searches, which are making up a larger and larger share of online traffic. 

In essence, hitting the right keywords within your website and meta information makes sure that you’re at the top of the list when it comes to Google searches in your particular field.

The problem with this is two-fold. 

First, the inner workings of search engine rankings are secret and will naturally change over time. 

Secondly, the searches that consumers perform will change over time as their needs and wants evolve.

Both of these factors add up to one single outcome – you need to keep on top of your optimization to stand out. 

If you see a drop in traffic, you likely need to redo your metadata to upstage your competition.

Hitting a home run with competitive intelligence

With this complete guide on competitive intelligence, you should be able to get the edge your need over competitors.

You’ll understand what competitors are after, their plans, and indirectly – what customers want.

The journey doesn’t end here, though. Once you have customers’ attention, you need to provide them with a show they won’t forget. Check out our ecommerce customer experience guide to get up to speed on the topic.

How to Use Consumer Insights in Your Favor: The Definitive Guide (2022)

Consumer insights are your customers’ truth – how they experience your product or service, how they felt about it, what they want, need, and desire.

Understanding your consumers’ needs and wants is essential to ensuring your brand’s future. Scanning, collecting, and analyzing customer feedback empowers businesses to learn from their customers – so they can innovate and improve customer experiences and generate positive sentiment.

This blog post is your definitive guide to consumer insights. 

We will explain what are customer insights, their importance, how you can use them in your favor, and what impact the spread of COVID-19 has had on customer feedback analysis.

Another note we would like to add, Revuze Explorer is one of the most advanced consumer insights tools out there. Our true strength is turning consumer insights into actionable action items for companies, all done in minutes instead of days & weeks.

Last update: November 2021.

What are Consumer Insights?

Consumer Insights are analyzed data businesses use to better understand customer wants, needs, attitude, and sentiment. Useful Consumer Insights are new, relevant and inspiring, and provide extensive knowledge of consumer desires, needs, and motivations. These insights help improve a brand’s interaction with customers, which creates better customer experience and improves revenue.

So, how do you find consumer insights? Well, data. 

Consumer insights are a result of data interpretation and analysis. They are aggregated from data collected with different tools, like trend analysis, customer satisfaction surveys, focus groups, Social Listening, and more.

Why are consumer insights important?

First and foremost, consumer insights give the tools to make better business decisions. Improving customer experience, focusing marketing campaigns, and optimizing brand innovation will help drive brand growth and revenue.

In addition, customer insight analysis helps identify consumer and market trends, pain points and attitudes. This information highlights consumer sentiment and experience on different parts of the consumer journey, data that helps brands build and maintain customer loyalty.

How can consumer insights improve advertising?

I’m glad you asked.

Advertising and marketing your product can be hard. It is hard to know how successful your campaigns are or how your latest ad resonated with your target audience.

The job can be even harder when we talk about e-commerce. Online consumers come from all walks of life, from different generations, with varied interests, and unique needs. For example, Baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z are all very different and come with their own particular wants and needs. So, what may work for one audience won’t necessarily work for all.

This is where consumer insights come into use.

Consumer insights allow businesses to get a better and deeper look into their customers’ purchase decisions and behaviors. Insights enable brands to identify the best marketing campaigns and strategies that will resonate most powerfully with the targeted audience.

Using consumer insights allows you to make a smooth and data driven shift from product-focused marketing to consumer-centric marketing. For instance, what if you could focus your ad campaign on a customer-desired feature? Quality consumer insights enable you to do just that.

Taking an example from our latest Headphones Market Report, after analyzing customer feedback we have identified noise cancellation as the latest trend in the wireless headphones industry. Just look at the noise cancellation topic volume chart below –

Revuze Dashboard

Using this data to create a more focused, optimized, customer-centric advertising strategy will allow you to achieve your marketing objectives more effectively and efficiently, saving you valuable time and money.

How to use consumer insights in your favor?

Now that you know what are consumer insights and why they are so important. It’s time to understand how to use them in your favor.

We already covered the positive impact consumer insights can have on your marketing efforts. Here are some other aspects of your business can profit from consumer insight analysis – 

Consumer loyalty – 

Consumer or Brand loyalty is a strong positive consumer sentiment, meaning people will choose a particular brand over all the others. Businesses with a strong and well-founded brand loyalty will enjoy returning customers that’ll make repeat purchases. 

Quality consumer insight analysis provides information about which brand aspect is the customer’s favorite and why. Optimizing customer experience (or even the product itself) based on that data will make people feel heard, cultivating customers’ emotional connection and loyalty.

Customer service – 

Identifying customer pain points using insight analysis helps brands stay ahead of the game. Knowing what is bothering your customers will help you improve your customer service – you can plan your  response, prevent issues from recurring, and even train and educate your staff to better handle customer complaints and inquiries. 

Optimizing your customer service will not only create and cultivate customer loyalty, it will attract new clientele through positive word-of-mouth, and might even improve brand equity.

Consumer Insights In the COVID-19 Era

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) spreads across the world, consumers and businesses are forced to dramatically rethink their commercial behaviors. This means customer feedback and its analysis must change as well.

People are afraid and worried not only for their health, but for their jobs and saving too. These financial concerns have resulted in major emotional and economical shifts, ones that have to be taken into account when collecting and analyzing consumer insights.

Maybe the most important thing you can do is listen. The constantly changing global reality calls for flexibility and open mindedness. For example, you might want to abandon the normal barrage of survey questions. Asking fewer, more open-ended questions will help you get more extensive, detailed answers from your clients, so you won’t miss vital insights.

Another much needed aspect these days is adaptability. Quick thinking and short response times are essential for brands to survive such tumultuous times. building up your brand’s capacity to make short-term changes largely depends on quality information. Consumer insights allow you to test changes and prioritize future ones. Knowing what your customers are feeling and thinking will help you adapt to the coronavirus crisis.

Getting started with consumer insights

  • Establish your goals – Make sure you know what you want to learn from your data.
  • Identify resources – It’s important to be clear on how you will get the data – who’s going to collect and analyze it, what’s your collection method, what audience are you targeting?
  • Create a plan – In order to make sure all your efforts won’t go to waste, planning is key. So, think about what departments, processes, and strategies will use and benefit data the most.

We know collecting and analyzing customer feedback can be quite a challenge. Find out how Revuze’s AI powered CX analysis can help you get quality consumer insights that’ll push you to the next level!