Are you truly putting your customer at the heart of your business?
McKinsey recently found that 65% of businesses felt customer insights should be a true ‘thought partner’ of the entire organization. And yet, only 23% have achieved this level of maturity.
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Good news: affordable tools abound to help you figure out exactly what your customers — existent and potential — are looking for, so you can crawl inside their minds and deliver an experience they love.
TLDR: If you’re short on time, each tool listing has a one-line summary to give you the absolute top-level benefit. Otherwise, let’s dig in.
TrenDemon
Improve your content marketing efforts.
TrenDemon analyzes your website to identify which sources, pages, and paths yield the highest ROI and conversion rates based on your established goals. The advanced platform then presents personalized content, recommendations, and unique CTAs for each visitor.
A tool like TrenDemon is useful for any website but particularly beneficial to sites experiencing low conversion or high bounce rates.
With TrenDemon, you can expect much lower “do nothing” rates – the percentage of visitors who simply come and go – because it creates personalized content based on the unique visitor, rather than generic messages and a one-size-fits-all approach.
You can also set, track, and optimize specific goals like lead generation, social media shares, or email sign-ups.
Omniconvert
Find the conversion leaks on your website, then optimize and improve.
Omniconvert’s promise is to help you get more conversions on your website from the same amount of traffic. They do this by offering four useful methods for online marketers: UI/UX audit, quantitative research, qualitative research, and technical audits.
Omniconvert stands out with its advanced audience segmentation.
The platform’s ability to show visitors unique content based on geolocation, weather patterns, referrer, and on-site behavior means you can capture your audience’s attention in ways you may not have thought possible.
Crazy Egg
Understand which pages, buttons, and ‘hot spots’ are getting traction.
Crazy Egg is like a pair of X-ray glasses that lets you see exactly what people are doing on your site, which makes it the perfect addition to this list. It uses heat maps, scroll maps, overlays, and confetti maps to show visitor activity on your website.
Once you know where visitors are looking, clicking, and especially what they’re struggling to find, you can adjust your site and content to facilitate better experiences for them, and more conversions for you.
Fanplayr
Create sales and content offers that are personalized to an individual customer.
Fanplayr is fairly similar to TrenDemon, with an added focus on eCommerce optimization. It collects “digital body language” – characteristics like referral source, page views, product views, price ranges, and cart additions – to analyze visitor behavior.
Before in-depth personalization tools came around, marketers had two options for sales offers: focus on a few items people may or may not want, or markdown the whole shop.
Now, you can abandon both strategies for a much more appealing one: making great offers on items individual customers are sure to love.
CartStack
Increase your sales by reaching out to customers who have abandoned cart.
CartStack’s mission is to help you recover 15% or more of abandoned carts with automated cart recovery emails. It’s easy to implement, featuring WordPress compatibility as well as top online shopping cart providers such as Magento, ZenCart, and BigCommerce.
Barilliance found that over 75% of shoppers choose to leave a site without completing a purchase. Why? Another study by Statista revealed that the primary reason is high shipping costs, followed by ineffective discount codes.
CartStack can help you figure out the main reasons your buyers are jumping ship and get more of them back on board.
Oktopost
Feed social data to your marketing automation platform and deliver better social media experiences.
Oktopost is a social media management platform made specifically for B2B businesses. Though it boasts several useful tools, the best one for gaining keen real-time insight into the minds of your audience is its social media monitoring dashboard. This feature allows you to create live streams that track keywords, mentions, company pages, and more.
With Oktopost, you can easily follow and join conversations that impact your brand, engage with potential business prospects and partners, reply to feedback from customers, track key competitor activities, and find inspiration for your next campaign.
Simply Measured
Gather advanced social data to measure, inform, optimize, and learn.
Considering 23% of consumers would snub a brand after a negative social interaction, it’s important to prioritize your brand’s positive approachability and response time.
True success on social media isn’t just about putting out great content and engaging in conversation — you need to be measuring and analyzing the market and your performance as well. That’s where Simply Measured comes in.
Recently acquired by Sprout Social for its advanced analytics, Simply Measured not only helps you assess the behavior of your audience in quantitative terms — trends, keyword usage, etc. — it also helps highlight the impact of wider brand activities among your target audience.
Topsy Analytics
Analyze and explore billions of social conversations in a digestible format.
Topsy is most known for its global social data index, but its Twitter dashboard is perfect for comparing keywords, mentions, and domains. The index includes every tweet since Twitter launched in 2006, giving you access to millions of conversations and topics.
Once you enter up to three keywords into the tool, it graphs usage stats for the past month. Topsy’s attractiveness lies in its simplicity.
Topsy has one very specific function, but it’s powerful if used wisely. For example, you can easily measure which topics your audience cares about most and craft your future content around it, instead of guessing or wasting your efforts covering irrelevant material.
You can also use it to assess the popularity of your own past blog posts (using the domain feature) as well as your competitors (using the @mention feature).
Klaviyo
Gather granular insights about your audience to build stronger eCommerce experiences across email and other owned channels.
Email marketing holds a treasure trove of insights about your audience. Moreover, the data gleaned from your subscribers is more valuable than what you’d get from general site visits and social media.
When it comes to email statistics, few tools go as in-depth as Klaviyo while still providing an aesthetically pleasing user-friendly interface.
With Klaviyo, you can target customers based on the products they purchase, what they looked at on your site, where they interact with your emails, and how much they spend.
Rejoiner
Learn which email copy, designs, and segmentation drive the most revenue.
What Fanplayr and TrenDemon do for websites, Rejoiner does for email. Behind the scenes, it tracks customer behavior onsite and in emails so it can send highly relevant personalized messages to past and potential customers to help maximize revenue, convert abandoned carts, and optimize email campaigns.
The best audience insight tools are the ones that not only track the data but also allow you to act upon it by providing customers exactly what they’re looking for.
Another bonus with Rejoiner is that you get the hands-on consultation of an email marketing agency included with the software. Or, you can just opt for their self-service version.
Get Satisfaction
Extract actionable feedback from your own online customer community.
Get Satisfaction provides a community platform to help your customers and potential customers get answers and information quickly, both from you and other users.
The platform integrates directly with your website and social media channels, allowing you to provide public support as well as conduct private discussions — making it a full customer support and knowledge database solution.
By providing a central location for customers to have discussions about and around your product, you are in a unique position to hear directly from them regarding:
- What needs improvement
- What they love about your product
- How they rank you in comparison to competitors
- What they expect from you in the future
Medallia for Digital
Collect real-time customer feedback across multiple channels.
Medallia for Digital is a product which combines Medallia’s powerful data analytics platform with Kampyle’s (acquired by Medallia in 2016) near-instant web and mobile feedback.
The result is a truly omnichannel customer view — meaning, one that allows you to act on all customer experience touchpoints with data.
Use the analytics dashboards to easily gauge your performance in both historical and real-time, identifying where your program is succeeding and where additional investments are needed.
Yelp (and other review sites)
Craft marketing messages using language your audience is already using.
Review sites for businesses and service providers such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie’s List, and even the Better Business Bureau, hold a wealth of insights into what customers are looking for and where your competitors are falling short.
These sites are also great sources for discovering the right messages and phrasing to include in your site and headlines.
If they’re using it in reviews, chances are they’re using it in their searches as well. Moreover, stealing (or “borrowing”, if you prefer) your customers’ own words is a guaranteed way to make sure your message connects with them.
Where to begin?
This list might seem overwhelming, but you don’t have to implement all the tools mentioned.
Instead, identify the areas most likely to give you the best insights based on the stage of your business, then pick the tools that match up.
Start with the free trials and don’t be shy to negotiate terms.
The only wrong move is to avoid audience insight tools altogether and make blind business decisions as a result. In today’s intense eCommerce climate, you need all the tricks you can get – and these tools were designed to provide exactly that advantage.
