Why your marketing strategy needs customer experience (CX) analytics

Marketers are increasingly lauded for possessing the “Swiss army knife” skillset: customer research and content creation to campaign strategy and data analysis — the list grows. Among these skills is the growing demand for data analysis. With the trove of data a digital company can collect, they need team members who can make sense of it to perform their roles more effectively.

Unfortunately, many marketers aren’t schooled in data analysis; we learn as we go. Many of us are stuck manually pulling reports and sifting through them. 

How can we supplement our data analysis skills and make sense of valuable customer information? This article covers the essentials of customer experience analytics and the tools to supplement the lack of a marketing data specialist, making our work easier.

What is customer experience (CX) analytics?

Customer experience analytics discovers, collects, and interprets data about the customer journey. It’s a fancy term for data supporting marketing efforts (and most company efforts, specifically marketing, in this article). Customer experience analytics furnishes evidence that shoppers interact positively with your brand and become loyal, returning customers — or it exposes a journey fraught with friction. 

If done right, CX analytics (which we call it for short) includes as many customer touchpoints as possible to document an accurate, multi-channel journey map. This journey map will highlight customer pain points, seek improvement opportunities, and help you identify gaps where customers fall off the map.

How does CX analytics benefit marketers?

If CX analytics sounds best confined to, well, your CX team, you’re wrong. Yes, the burden of CX data shouldn’t fall solely on the marketer. However, most internal teams benefit from access to CX analytics. This is precisely how accurate customer data makes marketers’ lives easier.

Proving the benefits of branding campaigns

KPIs give concrete answers to the stakeholder question, “Is your marketing leading to revenue?” However, KPIs are harder to track for branding campaigns than direct response strategies. How do you measure the value of your brand recognition?

CX analytics can signal that your brand has a positive reputation, helping you measure CLTV, churn, retention, etc.

Creating personalization opportunities

CX analytics can segment customers by behavior, allowing marketers to reach a particular audience with personalized messaging. 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when they personalize campaigns. Some of the most common hallmarks of good CX and marketing require personalization.

For instance, you can send reminder emails to a segment of customers whose subscriptions will lapse this week about the upcoming renewal. Without segmented audiences, reaching these customers before they churn would be impossible.

Identifying customer retention opportunities

CX analytics identifies customers that fall through the cracks, which is where marketers can step in to keep customers engaged.

From the above example, the segment audience of at-risk churners is one method, but many more opportunities exist to encourage customer loyalty. When you tap into customer data, you find one-time shoppers on the fence about a second purchase, product fans returning regularly, and VIPs making the most of your loyalty program. 

Identifying how these customers interact with your product gives you an idea of how to market toward them to keep them coming back (see also: loyalty programs!).

Increasing ROI

Analytics are a necessity in modern marketing as companies increasingly rely on data-driven decisions. However, 43% of marketers still rely on manual attribution using spreadsheets. To make matters worse, most marketers can’t quantitatively demonstrate the impact of marketing.

CX analytics will help you prove marketing works at all funnel stages. It’ll even help you take it a step further — you can use these analytics to increase ROI once you find gaps in the customer journey.

How does CX analytics work?

Most marketers lack access to robust CX data and are stuck manually attributing marketing efforts. A system of collecting, unifying, and activating data would put marketers ahead of the competition, and that’s what good CX analytics does. 

Real-time data collection

For accurate insights, you should collect data from multiple channels in real time. Manually pulling reports results in inaccurate customer analytics since it introduces human error and does not provide up-to-the-minute information. 

The best CX analytics, when effectively configured, is automatic. That alone saves marketers hours.

Unifying data

To unify data, you bring all the information from disparate sources into one single source of truth (SSOT) in a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake. This includes social media interactions, website visits, customer service chats, app installs, and more. 

Then, using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Simon can use this unified data to compose a 360 view of each customer, compiling these interactions under one customer ID. With all this data unified, you can segment customers by their behaviors and identify all the elements of a customer journey. 

Activating data

Once data is unified, what’s left is to activate it — make the data accessible and actionable. 

Often, marketers must manually fulfill this activity. We take unified data and use it to create different email newsletters by customer persona or build a social media campaign. We also build reports that make these tactics iterable.

However, these days we have tools that make activating data less of a burden on the marketer — more on that in a minute.

The challenges of collecting quality CX data

We can find a solution by naming the problems associated with quality analytics. This is why most marketers aren’t using CX data effectively.

Data siloes

Simply unify all your data to an SSOT, and you’ll have an accurate picture of each customer. Easy, right? 

There’s a reason so many marketers are still manually attributing with spreadsheets. Collecting data from multiple sources means cleaning and consolidating it, which without the right tool, takes too much time for many teams to execute.

Data scope

Most marketers, though data-minded, aren’t data analysts. How can we ingest data from multiple sources, mainly as our customer base grows and marketing strategy expands to new channels?

CX analytics requires customer insights teams to be on board, and the right tools ensure buy-in.

Creating context

Data needs context to be actionable, but it’s difficult to interpret without experience. Many marketers are expected to pull their reports and analyze results, whether certified to do so or not.

Why CX analytics needs a CDP

CDPs are the answer. Even high-profile and experienced teams need the right marketing strategy, customer data,  and tools — including a CDP like Simon Data to make customer data actionable.

Take, for instance, BARK, a subscription service for dog toys and treats. Over the years, BARK’s demand grew, sales increased, and customer data outpaced their tools for CX insights.

“BARK was dealing with and manually processing a ton of customer information,” says Kristen Elmer, Sr. Director, eCommerce Sales at BARK. “It was too much to manage, and the customer data wasn’t always easily accessible or actionable.”  

A CDP works with a data warehouse to deliver actionable data insights for all teams, including marketing. “Simon makes testing, learning, segmenting, and customizing so much easier. I was doing this work manually in CSVs before, and now we can click, click, click and get a custom email out and not have to worry about undertaking a massive process,” says Kristen.

How do CDPs make life easier? These are the customer experience analytics they use to supercharge a marketing strategy.

The CX analytics your marketing strategy needs

There are some essential analytics for marketing specifically to inform your strategy. CDP or otherwise, you’ll want to be sure you can gather this information.

Customer journey visualization

A full breakdown of the customer journey for each persona is one of the most challenging and essential CX analytics. This requires multi-channel visualization of the marketing funnel from discovery to purchase and beyond.

Journey mapping and funnel analysis are some of the most common ways to visualize customer journeys, and visualization is essential for finding bottlenecks.

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Many tools exist to help you build a customer journey map. For instance, Simon’s Customer 360 gives users access to individualized customer profiles that give an accurate view of each touchpoint.

Sentiment analysis

Keeping an eye on customers’ feelings helps you understand the “why” behind their actions.

Sentiment analysis can involve using AI to summarize feedback from social media, reviews, and surveys. It can also include compiling feedback and attributing an NPS or CSAT score to customer interaction through surveys.

Behavioral analytics

Behavioral analytics, which gets more granular, identify patterns in customer interactions. For instance, they reveal which landing pages lead to the highest conversion or which links receive the most click-throughs. These insights are available in session recordings, heatmaps, and other similar tools.

Predictive analytics

Wouldn’t it be nice to transform customer data into predictions? Machine learning makes that a reality by ingesting all your customer data and identifying patterns in similar customers.

With predictive analytics, you can identify customers at risk of churn or shoppers who need an extra incentive to purchase. Predictive analytics can’t promise a bright future if you follow its warnings, but it does save hours of time identifying actionable insights, saving you from hunting for the patterns yourself.

Making CX analytics work for you

Without tools to support us, many marketers would have to trudge to school for a data science degree to excel in their roles. While it’s important we absorb as much as we can about data analysis, we have these tools to fill in the gaps.

The first step is looking at your marketing goals and current analytics efforts. Where do you need support, and where is your current process lacking? Putting customers at the heart of your strategy will make your marketing strategy more efficient, so it’s worth the audit.