How To Analyse Your Customers And Draw Conclusions

analyse your customers

As a business, irrespective of your size, years, or industry you operate in, you should never underestimate the importance and need to analyse your customers. To answer that crucial question of “Who is your target audience?” you need to know and understand who your customers are. This isn’t a new or even complex concept, but it requires a thoughtful analysis to establish meaningful information that gets you the customers you want and allows you to retain the ones you already have.

Benefits of Understanding Your Customers

Why do you need to analyse your customers? Well, they ultimately help you sell more. Regardless of the nature of your business, your customers are the key to your success. Every one of them is responsible for some form of profit to your organisation. The more you know about your customers, their needs and behaviours, the easier it is to pinpoint the best ways to engage with them/

Understanding your customers also helps with planning and management of resources. If you can predict what they will buy and how much, you can plan your resources accordingly to minimise loss. The more information you have access to about your customers, the better you can interact with them. Focus on identifying customer type brings you the most value. You can then use these profiles to nurture and build relationships with existing customers and when researching prospects.

Analysing your Customers

As we have established, your customers are a valuable source of information. But it’s important to collect the right data and to avoid making empty assumptions. So let’s break down the best ways to analyse your customers:

Demographic Profiles

A good place to start is finding out who your demographic is. If you sell directly to consumers, you will want to know their age, gender, income, where they live and so on. However, if you trade with businesses you need more relevant information like their size, the industry they operate in, location, scope, etc.

CRM systems can be a great tool to use as they have the ability to extract all this information for you at the click of a button.

Buying Behaviour

You also need to know what is making your customers buy your products or services. You need to consider what are your customers buying, how much and why, factors that influencing them and their needs and demands. Use these questions to help you analyse your customers, and you will be able to narrow down what your customer’s purchasing habits are. By establishing this, you will then be able to tailor your offering exactly to suit their needs and wants.

New vs. Returning Customers

The last crucial aspect of your customer analysis profile is determining whether your customers are coming back or converting from a prospect to a customer, depending on the nature of your business. If this is not the case, then there is something wrong. However, the above two points will help you establish this.

If the customer is not performing how you would like, then you need to detect what works and what doesn’t. Profiling your customers enables you to group them into different segments that you can approach separately.

Capturing Information

There are multiple ways you can collect the information you need about your customers. We list the best methods below:

Speak to your customers

Speaking to a few important customers, particularly if you’re a B2B business, is a good opportunity to get inside their heads. By speaking to them, you will get a real insight into how your customers behave and think and the information you obtain will be much more valuable than any other metrics and analytics package.

Feedback will always be worthwhile so if you can’t speak to your customers, why not use surveys or get in touch through email.

Measure interaction

If website activity is a significant aspect of your business strategy, you should be tracking how your customers are using your web pages. You should never assume that people are navigating your website as you have visualised; users can be unpredictable.

Your web hosting account and analytics package can provide a sizeable amount of data about your website visitors. While there is a lot of information on offer, look for the metrics that tell you where your visitors are from, what they are looking for, clicking on and how they go about finding it. Assessing this data on a regular basis will help you create a greater picture of your customers.

Create alternative paths

Another way of understanding your customer’s way of thinking is by controlling their actions. If you have a webpage that only consists of information on your product offering, ensure there are at least two action possibilities. By having two ‘calls of action’, you are leading your customers to distinct and clearly different outcomes. These different behaviour pathways will inform you what kind of customers you are attracting. There will be the active customers that want instant outcomes and the more thoughtful and guarded individuals.

Ultimately, knowing your customers and understanding their behaviour is an activity that you cannot ignore. Carry out a good, thorough study to properly analyse your customers, and you will be able to position your offering in the best possible way that gets them buying.

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