Exclusively using guesswork when making marketing decisions is a recipe for disaster. There’s nothing wrong with using your gut feelings to help guide you,—even Steve Jobs was known to pay close attention to his intuition—but that’s not a free pass to ignore market research.
“The market research data that we have and also our gut feelings from many, many years in the industry say that this marketplace … is gonna grow … ” Steve Jobs
Success is built on a healthy mixture of deep data and trusting your gut. We’ll discuss whether marketers should use quantitative or qualitative analytics for assessing in-store behavior, product development, finding your customer’s language, and more.
Quantitative Analytics
Using Quantitative analysis, marketers can apply statistical and mathematical research, measurements, and other numerical values to understand behavior, and answer questions such as:
- What entrance paths do visitors take to come to your site?
- Which pages do they exit from?
- How many incoming visitors result in a conversion?
- What is the ROI of your social media activities?
- How will festive or holiday periods impact foot traffic?
Below are a few areas you can apply Quantitative Analytics:
Improving customer experience
With customer journey analytics, you can discover customer experience obstacles along a journey, determine the impact of these obstacles on your business objectives, and evaluate the effectiveness of any remediations.
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Here’s an example:
A leading European energy retailer identified the home moving journey as a point of dissatisfaction among its customers, as well as a significant source of churn. One pain point was the way customers had to call the company via telephone no earlier than ten days before their move date and provide all of the necessary details. If they didn’t follow this exact path, the IT systems would not record their information. By employing a more customer-centric, analytical approach, the moving experience was redesigned into a customer journey that allowed users to provide their moving information during times and with methods that were more convenient for them, whether it was done on their phone, the web, or a smartphone app. This change led to a 50% increase in customer satisfaction and a 15% reduction in customer-service cost.
In-store behavior
Still using ‘door counting’ or POS data as your primary source of visitor data? Let those methods go. They limit your analysis only to those who actually buy from you. On the other hand, with Wifi or in-store beacon analytics, you gain access to accurate, real-time conversion rates from fitting rooms to the billing counter, most visited store sections and other metrics. Take a quick look at how analytics helped this grocery chain develop a clearer image of their customers.
With the Christmas quarter approaching, Morrisons considered how cart abandonment, customer behavior, and their cafe layout would impact sales. To track footfall, path analysis and recurring visit patterns, the retail store installed Walkbase Analytics in its store and found that queue lengths were worse when three or fewer check-outs were open during peak times. These insights lead to a change in staff rotas, which enabled Morrisons to increase customer satisfaction and reduce basket abandonment significantly.
Wifi and Beacon analytics could be helpful tools for learning the behavioral pattern of your customers, improving store layout, and maintaining service standards that will benefit you and your customers.
Prove the ROI of Social Media
If proving the ROI of your social media strategy makes you want to stay in bed on Mondays, you’re not alone. According to a recent CMO Survey, only 23.3% of marketers say they are able to prove the impact of social media quantitatively. G-Shock had the same problem. Here’s how they solved it with social analytics:
Spending upwards of eight hours pulling data from multiple sources to prove the ROI of G-Shock’s social media activities was cumbersome and inefficient for Casio UK’s Chief Digital Officer, Taka Takeuchi. Using engagement metrics such as click-through rates and consolidated reporting features, Takeuchi was able to prove social media was a revenue-driver and viable means of retention for the brand. Ultimately, G-Shock experienced a 218% YOY increase in CTR and an 839% YOY increase in engagement across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Unsure of which social media metrics to keep your eye on? Check out this article on how to grow a profitable and engaged following.
While quantitative analysis is fantastic for collating hard data that allows for a more objective view, there’s a drawback; numbers don’t tell the whole story. You need qualitative analytics to get a clearer picture.
Qualitative Analytics
Qualitative analytics provides information about individual customer behavior, such as their thoughts, feedback, and experiences with your products. You can attain this kind of data through customer surveys.
When to use Qualitative Analytics:
Figure Out Why Users Quit Your App
About 71% of all app users churn within 90 days. Qualitative mobile app analytic platforms, such as Appsee, Localytics and Apsalar offer user recordings that show exactly how users are using your app, what they’re having trouble with, and why users use your app once and never return.
Using Localytic’s Uninstall Tracking, online commerce platform, Peixe Urbano, looked at weekly uninstalls against other user activity to see what percentage of users uninstalled during the same week of their first session. They also analyzed uninstall rates across different devices to understand how Android and iOS software updates affect those behaviors. With the insights gathered, the company reduced mobile churn by 17% and increased one and two month user retention by 20% and 27%.
Qualitative mobile app analytics can prove invaluable to improve your user experience and ensure users stick to your app.
Product Development and Innovation
With online forums and website feedback, you can gauge consumers’ reaction to your product, identify unmet needs, receive product ideas and ultimately prevent the fate of extinction. Check out how SAAS optimization companies, Medallia Digital and Lithium helped brands boost product development and innovation using qualitative analytics.
Apparel brand City Beach Australia, used Medallia Digital’s web feedback and analytics features to gain insights into the online behavior of its website users. Those insights were then used to create a website that led to a 30% increase in online sales and a 25% increase in conversion rates.
Similarly, Global communications leader Verizon used Lithium Technologies to create and launch a dedicated ideation site called the Verizon Idea Exchange, where consumers shared opinions on Verizon products. The site kept Verizon’s consumer product teams in direct contact with engaged customers. Through the platform, 85% of Verizon’s IMG 1.9 software was customer suggested. In less than one year, 1700 customer ideas were submitted with 250 in progress and 31 implemented.
Gathering and implementing customer feedback is guaranteed to improve customer satisfaction and retention. Don’t sleep on it.
Find Your Customer’s Language
When you understand your customer’s language, you have a better chance of knowing what they need to hear or read in order to make a positive buying decision. How do you find your customer’s language? Text analytics.
Text analytics allows you take massive amounts of unstructured data from sources such as e-commerce platforms, social media, and surveys, and transform them into structured data that depicts actionable insights.
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Text analytics software can capture how consumers feel about your products in their own words. Use these insights to write better product descriptions, select the right keywords for your campaigns and ultimately increase conversions. Text analytics software such as Lexalytics, Bitext and ParallelDot have features that help marketers identify intentions (“will this person buy, quit, or recommend?”) and identify consumers who have the intent to purchase from you, so you can target them with personalized advertising.
Out With Gut Feelings, In With Analytics
The best analyses combine quantitative and qualitative analytics to create continuous improvement. So, even if you’re the next Steve Jobs, you need to do more than run with your gut. For marketing decisions that will promote growth and result in happier customers, create a cocktail of quantitative and qualitative analytics.