Marketing

Using customer insights to drive recovery in the pandemic: What 3 key steps do retailers need to follow?

James Alty, founder and managing director of Apteco, offers up three steps retailers can take in striving to rebound from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

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December 22, 2020 by James Alty

This year, many businesses are facing a period of uncertainty and challenges to their normal trading model.

Factors that were once a priority for how we made purchases prior to the pandemic are now likely to look very different for many. For example, ease of purchase and safety of delivery are likely to be closer to the top of more people's priority lists than before. This could have contributed to the well documented 40% boost in Amazon's revenue.

One of the most important factors to consider during this time, and in order to boost recovery as far as possible after the lockdown, is the use of customer data and taking action from data-led insights. Retailers should follow these three steps to help move toward recovery.

Step 1: Identify the customer data that will be relevant for your brand

Every brand will have a different understanding of what is best for them and their customers, so there is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to the data that will be most beneficial for your business.

However, you need to be able to view your business from your customers' point of view; from working out how to best communicate, to which products and services are most relevant in lockdowns and how you target each message or piece of content you share.

Firstly, you can start by using tools such as Hotjar to get familiar with your customers' behavior on your website — what pages are they spending most of their time on? What information and content are they interested in? Becoming more familiar with Google Analytics will also prove valuable, as you'll be able to identify the content that is driving the most traffic to your site, and therefore find what is of key importance to your customers.

Next, consider looking at factors such as time periods. Your customers' lives have been changed with working from home, no longer commuting, sharing childcare and more, which all change how and when they choose to interact with your brand. Consider whether you can break down this information by customer profiles — how does each customer persona compare for these time periods? Will you need to create content or services at different times to meet each profile's needs?

Step 2: Identify new ways to learn from customer data in the pandemic

Even the most ordinary of information can be priceless when it comes to knowing and understanding your customers' changing behavior better.

Customers that provide basic demographics such as location and age, or answer a simple question of why they've signed up to your newsletter or loyalty scheme, are all important. With the help of this data, you can segment customers into profiles based on their age, location, buying habits and the reason they want to connect with your brand — and then target them with appropriate product content, messaging and promotions that best meet their needs.

A key factor to be considered in the pandemic is year on year comparisons — how has 2020 changed for your businesses compared to this time last year? This needs to go beyond the headline measures of sales and revenue — as important as these factors are — in order to best get into your customer's mindset.

Look at the results; are customers making more frequent lower value purchases? If so, this could suggest your customers are facing personal financial challenges, or perhaps they don't fully trust that you as a brand will remain stable. If this is the case, consider what reassuring messaging you could use to position your brand as stable and heading towards a full recovery.

Step 3: Turning findings into actions

When you have your freshly gathered customer data at your fingertips, it's time to start sorting it in order to find actionable learnings and start making changes to your business..

At this stage, the support of technology - such as a data analysis tool - could be invaluable for you - through automating your data classification, segmentation and targeting processes of your customer data. Look for trends and changes - which products are doing better than last month or which sales are up through a particular channel?

Use dashboards and visualizations to make it easy to see the business changes' and annotate with external events and timeline to set a context for your results.

In addition to digesting and actioning the data that's right in front of you, it's also important to look forward and use this data combined with year on year data to make predictions for the future — whether that's next week, next month or even next year. What behavior, trends and priorities can you predict for each customer profile as we move towards the end of 2020? Plan a communication campaign that engages with these customers and reassures them of the long term value your business and brand offers.

At a time when the economic climate is highly unpredictable, one element of your business that can remain in your control is how you interpret, learn from and act on your customer's data. Use this effectively and you'll be on your way to driving recovery for your brand.

James Alty is founder and managing director of Apteco.

About James Alty

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Apteco is based in Warwick, UK and delivers software and services through offices in Frankfurt, Sydney and Rotterdam working with a global network of partner firms. James is experienced in B2B, B2C and not for profit marketing having worked on numerous marketing database, analytics and campaign management projects.

James graduated from Manchester University in Computation and started his career with Logica in The Netherlands, before moving on to found Apteco in 1987. He is always happy with the latest gadgets and able to understand both users’ and developers’ requirements. Outside Apteco, James is a qualified private pilot, single-speed cyclist, community volunteer and vice president of the local members’ sports club where he plays squash.

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