Mastering The Art Of Customer Behaviour Analysis (A Guide for Entrepreneurs)

There was a time when the marketing experts were wholly dependent on the past experience of their customers to understand their behavior. But with the evolution of digital marketing and introduction to several analytics tools, nowadays the technology being used to understand and analyze customer behavior has taken a new turn altogether.

Before this, a marketer used to rely mainly on the groups or polls to create an image of the consumer’s buying behavior they have. They used to have limited data to come to any sort of conclusion to complete a customer behavior analysis drill. But this has drastically changed after business enterprises have tilted more towards data-driven marketing and realized that it wasn’t enough to understand the customer after all.

With the advancement of technology and marketing practices being digitalized worldwide nowadays in order to make the customer happy understanding the customer’s mindset and behavior fully, you need to follow a certain & clear guideline to excel in this department.

So today’s post will be all about the importance and uses of customer behavior analysis. And how you can master yourself in understanding it to ensure more business sales & substantial gains for your company.

Essentiality of Customer Behaviour Analysis

How Should You Analyse Your Customer Behaviour To Boost Conversion Rate

Now the first thing you need to think about while analyzing the behavior of your customer is their types of behavior.

You need to know what kind of customers behaves in what ways. So the customer’s behavior type mainly includes:

Types of Customer Behaviour

Dilemma Prone

The customers get so much involved in the process of buying that sometimes they get confused between brands. The dilemma in mind occurs when the consumer feels that they might just regret their choice later on. A customer might buy a product from one store based on their preferred price and convenience, but after that, they would want to make sure from others whether they have bought the right item at the right price.

Complex-minded

These are those types of customers, who are highly involved in the purchasing process and often tend to do severe research before investing their money behind any products they want to buy. This happens mostly when they are likely to buy an expensive or unusually bought product or things such as a luxury car, houses, pieces of jewelry, etc.

Perpetual

Very little involvement in the process of purchasing their desired goods or brands is what is described as perpetual customer behavior. This means a customer goes to a store and buys the items they need without looking at the brand following a repeating pattern of the everyday. Its kinda like doing grocery shopping.

Variation-seeking

This sort of customer is really tough to satisfy, as they are always looking for something new in the items they are looking for. This type of consumer simply buys different products almost every time not because they didn’t like it but simply because they seek variety in everything every time. It’s like how you try new deodorant for your body some time, simply to smell different and better.

Things That Affects Customer Behaviour

There are a number of things that are responsible for affecting customer behavior and you as a business person need to analyze those factors to understand their behavior for the betterment of the business.

Financial Conditions

People having an economic crisis wouldn’t want to go for expensive products like houses or cars. And this financial condition could change for anyone anytime. So a current financially solvent consumer is likely to be more confident or willing while making any purchases for them not being too bothered about the state of their pocket.

On the other hand, a financially broken customer would always be hesitant in buying things for them and always look for cheaper alternatives of the same products they need. So any consumer’s buying habit could get affected depending on these personal factors of financial condition.

Other’s Influence

Sometimes other people close or known to the consumers can also affect the buying behavior of them. It plays a big role in the decision of buying something when the customer’s family members, relatives, friends, classmates, neighbors, or someone they look up to buys something.

This could influence their purchasing decision to e great deal. Picking junk food over healthy home-made meals could just be another example of such a situation. The level of education and the social actor also has an impact on it.

Personal Choice or Desire

Personal preference also plays a vital role in affecting customer behavior as well. After all, its always their choices, likes, dislikes, morals, priorities, and values that matter the most in most cases these days. Especially for the food & fashion industry, this personal preference thing acts more powerfully than in any other place. Sure some lucrative ads of products might have an influence on it too for driving the choices of customers these days.

But at the end of the day, you are mostly going to choose the thing you always liked. Say if you are always comfortable wearing jeans, then it wouldn’t really matter how many ads you see of other beautiful dresses, you would probably always look to buy a nice pair of jeans instead. So you wouldn’t just change your habit as you personally prefer it more than anything else.

Buying Ability

Last in this list of things affecting customer behavior is the buying ability or power that a consumer possesses for buying anything they want. Some people just simply buy expensive things not because they need them, just because they can. You wouldn’t really take your budget into considerations if you are a multi-millionaire person.

If you have the ability to buy anything then you would buy it no matter what. But if a customer is broke, then no matter how good your marketing campaigns or products are, you won’t be able to make any sales to them. So segmenting customers based on their ability to purchase things would very well help marketers discover the eligible consumer to achieve a better result in closing more sales.

Pattern of Customer Behaviour

The buying patterns that the customer has is quite dissimilar to the buying habit of a consumer. Each of them has their unique buying habit, that gets spontaneous over and is mainly developed as tendencies towards a specific action. On the other hand, buying pattern follows a common and predictable mental image. Hence, therefore, buying behavior patterns offers marketing agents with a different characterization and can be grouped as:

Purchasing Spot

In many cases. most customers will buy different products from different spots even if those same items are available in one place. Take supermarket as an example, where you are able to get everything at the same store starting from your clothes to your shoes but yet you will probably buy certain clothing or shoe items from the actual spot of that brand shop.

When a customer sees an opportunity to buy the same products from a different store, then they don’t really stay loyal to any particular store unless that’s the only place where they can go for shopping in their area. So the study and analysis of the customer’s choice of different purchasing spots help the marketing agents locate those stores.

Types of Items Purchased

There are certain things that need to be taken into consideration about the items that are being purchased and at what quantities it was purchased. A customer is more likely to goods in bulk for the things are their daily necessities while e luxury items are most likely to be bought in small quantities and in fewer quantities.

More often than not, the amount of items purchased is dependent or influenced by the quality of the item, purchasing ability of the consumer, price of each unit, and the number of customers that these products are intended for, etc. Such analytics of customer cart information provide the marketers with a number of valuable insights.

Frequency & Period of Purchase

Most customers will shop at a convenient time, like in the long weekends or before the start of a big holiday, etc. But they will also expect similar service from the shop owner even while shopping at the oddest of hours or period. And now especially with e-commerce stores & online marketplaces at your fingertips, the shops will have to take the responsibility & do anything to keep their customer satisfied.

As they will want to keep the frequency of purchases going by meeting all their expectations and demands understanding their buying period and pattern. So regional differences and seasonal variations should also be analyzed as a part of customer behavior.

Method Used To Purchase

One can easily get into a store and buy their desired items right away thereby paying in cash or swiping their debit/credit card. And with e-commerce stores everywhere, online payment via credit/debit is or cash on delivery services are the common methods of payment nowadays. And the method of purchase may also cause the spending limit to increase of a customer, even though you might even be charged for some extra bucks for shipping in case of online shopping.

But to tell the truth, it says a lot about the customer’s behavior and the kind of buyer he is based on the method they pick to purchase an item. So analyzing their method of purchase can also ensure some useful insight for your business growth.

Segmentation of Customer Behaviour

Most companies can’t really utilize the right method of customer segmentation even though it was always essential for understanding the type of purchaser they are. A study suggested that only 33% of businesses found customer segmentation to be significantly beneficial.

And since the customer experience and personalization became a big factor in defining most businesses, therefore, some common customer segmentations explained below are now even more imperative to analyze the real customer behavior to boost business sales.

Special Occasion or Event-based

Customers segmented based on events normally involves global and personal occasions. The majority of the marketing campaigns, deals, offers are targeted towards the global events like holidays of Christmas, New Year, Black Friday, Halloween and seasonal events that sees the most number of deals as well as sales.

There are also recurring based personal events that repeat at a certain time of each year, month, or even day. For example, Birthdays, Anniversaries, or even stopping to grab your daily morning coffee from Starbucks.

Also, there can be some occurrence of the rare-personal event, like any friend’s wedding. In such cases, it becomes really difficult to predict the event as those happen irregularly and spontaneously. All of these event-based behavior needs to be analyzed properly to prepare a certain marketing plan for individual customers.

Rate of Usage

Usage of service or product is another basic way to customer segmentation by behavior nowadays. And it is done based on the frequency at which a consumer buys or interacts with the products or services.

The usage behavior strongly indicates the loyalty of a customer as well as enables you to conjecture the probable lifetime value of that particular customer with your brand.

Benefit-hungry

A consumer who buys a shampoo can look into four different factors, sensitive hair, dull or dry hair, suits the hair, or its price. There is a chance of getting some valuable insights when you analyze the behavior of a customer that does maximum research of products or services. This reveals what features, benefits, values, use-cases, or issues are the most important factors that motivate or affect a consumer in their purchasing decision.

When a customer decides to buy a product then they put a much higher value on one or more benefits over the others. These are known as the primary benefits that eventually drive the customer in the decision of buying that product for them. So many customers regard the benefits of a product more than anything. Such customers should also be taken into account before analyzing their behavior.

User-role or Status

Now you have to take all the various user-roles or statuses of a user into consideration as a part of the potential customer behavior analysis process. Some of those statuses or roles of the user for the customer segmentation include:

• Subscribers
• Non-users
• Potential buyers
• First-time purchasers
• Loyal & regular buyers
• Ex-customers ( People who moved to a competitor’s brand from yours)

Level of Customer loyalty

Loyal customers work as an advocate for your business everywhere. They are the most precious blessing and an asset to your company. Sometime what one your marketers can’t do to make a sale, that can unknowingly be done by a loyal customer without much or no effort at all. More essentially these loyal clients are very easy to retain and you can always use their presence and loyalty towards promoting your brand everywhere.

And this level of loyalty can be analyzed through some of their behavioral data to segment those customers into a different category. So now as per those data, the marketing agents can now understand the needs of those customers and then makes sure they are satisfied & well taken care of.

These loyal clients should always be given royal treatment so that it always makes them feel special during the time they are using your products or services. Always make them feel privileged enough with exclusive customer loyalty bonus or reward them with exciting gifts or deals. This would certainly strengthen your bonding & relationship with them making them your long-lasting free advocate for the company. This segmentation of loyal customers can certainly boost your conversion if you can analyze to understand their behavior properly.

Level of Customer Journey

Segmenting at every stage of the customer journey is an important phase of the whole customer behavior analysis program. This enables marketers to personalize experience & adjust the communication process in order to boost conversion.

More importantly, in order to recognize the biggest barriers and the scope of improvement, it allows the marketers to discover the levels of the customer journey, where they are least progressing. This is done even to understand the post purchasing behavior phase of the customer to help identify the level of their journey better.

Analyze Customer Behaviour The Right Way to Ensure Consistent Business Growth

So far we have learned, how customer behavior, segmentation, data, and other relevant customer report & analytics can help you understand their behavior and boost your conversion rate. But understanding and analyzing all this will get much easier for you when you will have a comprehensive CRM tool that helps you get valuable insight into customer engagement, activities, and their usual characteristics.

And in order to make the right judgment of the customer’s mood & attitude, there is always a comprehensive tool like WP ERP CRM. Yes, its a complete CRM tool that allows you to get various customer reports with a data-driven analytical option. And so such an analytical platform can definitely enable you to understand the behavior of your customer as well as the core conversion metrics of your site. Moreover, its features don’t only limit to customer management, as it integrates seamlessly with its in-built modules for any company’s HR management and Accounting system.

You will be able to learn more about its powerful features & functionalities right here in this link ⬇️

There you have it, your full and final remedy covering all the essential aspects to understand customer behavior is all set and ready. Now we hope as an entrepreneur your journey of trying to analyze customer data and behavior will be seen from a new perspective.

Share your take or thoughts regarding customer behavior analysis in this modern-day era. Did we miss anything that you would like to discuss further? Let us know in the comments below.