Customer Behaviour Analysis – How to Use Your CRM to Figure Out Your Customers

Carl Taylor | September 5, 2022

If you don’t know what drives your customers’ decisions, you can’t get them to buy from you. Here’s how you can use CRM to deepen your understanding of your customers.

Knowing your ideal customer and creating a customer avatar is crucial to running a successful business. But understanding who’s buying from you isn’t enough to boost your conversion rate and make more sales.

The key to selling lies more in understanding customer behaviour. Contrary to the popular understanding of customer behaviour, this has little to do with how people or businesses buying your products act when interacting with you. Where an avatar is comprised of specific traits, demographics, location, and other factors, customer behaviour is entirely different.

This concept describes how the people you want to buy from you actually go about purchasing the things they need.

The behaviour is defined by social trends, buying habits, and even purchasing frequency patterns.

Why do you need to know these things? 

Well, if you understand how people buy from you, you’ll have an easier time coming up with better, more targeted offers. In addition, you’ll create more engaging customer journeys that will boost your conversion rate and increase sales.

Of course, to use customer behaviour in your marketing strategy, you must fully understand and learn to analyse. And with the right CRM tool, you can do just that.

The Factors That Affect Customer Behaviour

Before going over why customer behaviour analysis will benefit your business, it’s important to discuss influencing factors.

One of the most significant and hardest factors to predict is the psychological response. Not everyone reacts the same, and people’s perceptions can be altered from one day to the next based on particular experiences and interactions.

Imagine going out to dinner and a waiter spills something on you. What circumstances would make it easier for you to forgive them?

If you were fired that day, or if you got promoted? It’s likely the latter.

Psychological responses heavily influence behaviour, and they too can be influenced by various situations, making them hard to predict.

But not all factors that affect customer behaviour are internal. Social trends play a critical role, and they’re as external as influences get.

Think of cultural trends, recommendations, and even specific societal norms. These are things that affect people’s decision-making process every day.

Some might even have a permanent effect on how people think about or shop for certain products and services.

To maximise your marketing efforts, you have to account for these factors consistently when it comes to your target audience.

Of course, personality traits also dictate how some people react and make decisions.

 

How Does Customer Behaviour Analysis Help?

There are a number of good reasons to employ customer behaviour analysis in your business. Personalisation is the name of the game when it comes to digital marketing. If you don’t do it correctly, you risk up to 41% of your customers switching to competitor brands.

Therefore, you need to start understanding your customers better. Behaviour analysis will help you uncover valuable data that you can use with demographic variables to segment your target audience.

Through segmentation, you’ll be able to curate your content better and create targeted personalised sales campaigns. This should also boost your customer retention rate.

Furthermore, customer behaviour analysis will clarify your target audience’s motivations and needs. While market trends can give you some insight into how to fulfil your audience’s demands, behaviour analysis lets you tap into people’s unconscious decisions.

It all really comes down to gathering more valuable data. Data-driven campaigns are significantly more successful.

This type of analysis can quantify even the tiniest behavioural nuances to support better decision-making at all levels inside your company.

 

How to Use Your CRM to Analyse Your Customers

While it may be challenging to completely analyse your customers’ behavioural nuances, you have a powerful tool at your disposal that can make this process a lot easier. And that is your CRM. Here are some ways you can utilize this tool to gain a deeper understanding of your customers: 

Segmenting Audience Groups Based on Behaviour

Although every business has a target audience, the customer base can be segmented further into several groups. 

At first, you’ll approach the segmentation process by looking at demographic data. You can start with the basic information provided by Google Analytics. It’s nothing too fancy, but it’s a decent start.

However, you’ll want to eventually go beyond professional backgrounds, shopping trends, where people live, etc.

Using CRM software will help you track things like how customers respond to various ads. Or you can quantify what people engage with the most at every stage of your sales funnel.

Once you identify similar behavioural patterns, you can start segmenting your audience into multiple groups.

Even though every group is essential, your primary focus should be the most valuable customer group. This is a vital segment as it’s likely responsible for the largest chunk of your revenue.

In addition, identifying the most valuable customer group will allow you to work backwards to outline other significant segments.

Understanding the Different Types of Customer Behaviour

You can break down customer behaviour into four types:

  • Habitual
  • Variety-seeking
  • Dissonance-reducing
  • Complex

In essence, the type of behaviour is often indicated by what people need, the differences between brands, and even one’s level of involvement.

These are key drivers of consumer behaviour. Once you learn about the types, you can better understand the decision-making process of various target audience segments.

Data provided by CRM software can help in this regard.

Collecting Vital Data

When collecting customer behaviour data, you must account for internal and external sources. 

For example, subscription information, social media metrics, and product usage are known as internal statistics. You can track, quantify, and pull this data using your CRM to uncover customer trends and patterns.

However, additional data points might be necessary to accurately analyse customer behaviour and extrapolate relevant information.

This means that looking outside your business is a must. Third-party consumer reviews, market insights, and competitor analytics can fill in the blanks.

Even if you might run into general statistics, the more data points you use in your analysis, the more accurate your segmentation and targeted marketing will be.

It’s also important to take into account direct feedback. Every business can track metrics using a CRM and make deductions based on data. But the individuality of various consumers will present a strong influence.

Therefore, you will have to use more qualitative research techniques to uncover relevant information about your target audience. So, when metrics fall short, interviews, questionnaires, and direct conversations can offer valuable answers.

They can shine a light on people’s tendencies to research competitors, on how much pricing influences their decisions, or on urgency-driven shopping patterns.

While CRM software doesn’t track these things by default, it can help automate customer interactions and collect behavioural trends to improve the accuracy of your analysis.

Personalising Content and Campaigns Based on Behaviour

After you collect qualitative data and identify critical segments of your audience based on your behaviour, you can start personalising your messaging.

Remember that not everyone has the same response to ads and content. Consumers want to be heard and understood. It’s one of the reasons omnichannel marketing and using a consumer-centric approach yields higher lead generation and conversion rates.

So, use your CRM metrics and other behaviour-driven data points to curate personalised content and marketing campaigns for your audience.

This will enable you to interact with prospective buyers at the best time for them. Thus, you’ll spark maximum engagement.

From there, hitting your goals, whatever they are (sales, lead generation, traffic increase, etc.), will be easier.

This is one area in which Automation Agency can help. Our Concierge Service and Design Heroes can handle a wide range of tasks, including Facebook Ad design, compliance, and customisation, so you don’t have to worry about meeting your audience’s expectations.

Identifying Key Selling Points

As part of the personalisation process, you’ll have to leverage key selling points. Again, you’ll notice that these differences between audience segments are based on behaviour.

Identify these selling points by getting inside the minds of your target customer base. Figure out why people are buying certain products and services.

Uncover the most significant buying triggers that guide their decision-making process.

Use that information to appeal to each audience segment in a unique way that can ensure you get more visitors and qualified leads.

Applying the Analysis to Campaigns

Odds are you’re already using a marketing campaign or at least have some ideas of how to proceed.

But if you’re not getting great results, it might be time to apply customer behaviour analysis to your campaign.

Capitalise on the information you’ve collected and work on optimising your strategy. Identify new opportunities to improve channel delivery based on audience segments and trends.

Create better nurturing experiences to drive more sales and improve customer retention.

The biggest advantage this newfound knowledge can give you is understanding where to make adjustments that your customers will approve.

Examining the Results

What many businesses get wrong is that they stop analysing after tweaking their campaigns. Implementing new initiatives and tactics won’t be enough to ensure sustainable growth.

You have to leverage your CRM software to track changes in your results.

Do you have an improved customer acquisition cost? Have you increased the customer lifetime value? Is your conversion rate better?

These are just a couple of things you have to keep an eye on to learn if your customer behaviour analysis was successful.

If it wasn’t, it could come down to two reasons:

  • You haven’t learned relevant information about your audience’s behavioural trends.
  • You haven’t used the data well enough to gain an advantage in your market.

So, it’s essential to keep at it.

While some customer behaviours can be permanent, others keep changing. Therefore, whatever strategy you use will need consistent tweaking to yield the best results and get closer to your goals.

Learn More About Your Customers

It’s easy to assume that all your customers share the same traits and buying motivations. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Despite the many similarities, your audience comprises many segments – even more so if you offer multiple products and services.

That’s why you can’t treat everyone the same and expect excellent feedback across the board.

Digging deeper into customer behaviour and using your CRM to make sense of the information will be vital to your marketing efforts and return on ad spend.

The more you learn about your customers, the better equipped you’ll be to engage potential buyers, convert, make sales, and increase the average lifetime value of loyal, repeat customers.

If you need help in this area, feel free to contact Automation Agency. Reach out to our Concierge Service and let us take on some of your more demanding CRM tasks. Our team of experts is well versed in personalisation, automation, and design protocols. Let’s see how we can put your customer behaviour analysis to good use.

 

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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