*I frequently get asked questions about Data Science, so in the interest of helping as many people as possible, I’ve started this blog to answer those questions as simply as possible. This is a robust topic, and if you want a more in-depth discussion, please revisit my blog, where we will be going into greater depth at another time.
Client insights can give you a deep look into how your customers feel about your products, services, and business as a whole. Taking advantage of client insights can allow you to make changes that increase your revenue and cut your costs, all while improving your customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
Client insights, or consumer insights, is the understanding of your customer’s data, including their behaviors and any feedback they provide, which can then be used to improve aspects of your business, such as product development, customer service, and the consumer experience as a whole.
Client insights can be extremely valuable to your business operations, and there are several ways to put them to good use. Specifically, how can you use client insights to drive revenue and cut costs? Here is what you need to know.
Table of Contents
Identifying Key Client Insights
#1. Analyzing Purchase History
#5. Tracking Trends in Customer Behavior
Leveraging Client Insights to Increase Revenue
#1. Targeting Your High-Value Clients
#2. Customizing Product Offerings
#4. Identifying Opportunities for Upselling and Cross-Selling
Using Client Insights to Cut Costs
#1. Streamlining Product Offerings
#2. Reducing Customer Acquisition Costs
#3. Improving Customer Retention
Applying Client Insights to Drive and Enhance Business Strategies
#1. Developing Data-Driven Sales and Marketing Strategies
#2. Improving the Customer Experience
#3. Improving Your Brand Reputation
#4. Identifying New Market Opportunities
Identifying Key Client Insights
Identifying client insights can provide you with actionable findings that can help you expand your business’s offerings while directly addressing your customer’s wants and needs. Collecting client insights is also a way to attempt to get your business goals and your customer’s needs in alignment.
The key to gathering client insights is data collection. Luckily, there are several avenues you can take here, including conducting market research and focus groups or gathering customer-centric data like purchase trends and reviews.
Some of the ways you can gather and identify your company’s client insights include:
- Analyzing Purchase History
- Reviewing Feedback
- Conducting Surveys
- Tracking Sales Trends
- Tracking Trends in Customer Behavior
#1. Analyzing Purchase History
Analyzing your customer’s purchase history can give you a direct look at what products and services are most popular, both in general and among specific customer demographics. You can easily gather this information from your company’s e-commerce platform, customer relationship management, or CRM system.
You can then use this information to track and predict customer behaviors. For example, you may find that a specific product sells great in the summer but collects dust in your warehouse during the winter. Knowing this, you can stock your inventory accordingly and avoid wasting money on products that won’t sell.
Analyzing purchase history will also help you identify any products or services you may benefit from building on and what has or hasn’t been working for your business thus far.
#2. Reviewing Feedback
Online reviews and feedback are some of the most authentic sources to gauge how your customers feel. You can find these reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, and several other platforms.
You can use this information to identify what your customers like and don’t like about your offerings and identify areas worthy of improvement. You can also see what your customers like about the competition, which can help you find ways to improve upon your shortcomings and work to stand out. You can also use this feedback to stay on top of any potential complaints your customers have and see if they’re being solved as you work to develop solutions.
#3. Conducting Surveys
Conducting surveys is a great way to reach your customers, and it’s even easier today with the abundance of online survey tools that allow you to reach customers via email, social media, and so on. You can also ask a range of questions, including multiple-choice or open-answer questions that allow your customers to share more insights.
You can ask questions like, “How did you find us?” and “What could we improve on?” This is a good way to measure customer satisfaction and gather constructive feedback that can help you improve areas your customers identify as troublesome.
#4. Tracking Sales Trends
Tracking sales is an important aspect of any business as it allows you to see the money coming in and going out. Analyzing sales trends can show you what your most popular products and services are and which ones don’t sell as well.
You can also track sales trends seasonally to see how your customers behave at different times of the year and how their purchase behavior impacts your revenue.
#5. Tracking Trends in Customer Behavior
You can use client insights to build customer personas based on your consumer’s behaviors, demographics, and purchasing decisions that help you better understand who your audience is and indicate how you can best reach them.
The more you understand your consumers and their behaviors, the better you can deliver the right messaging and product placement at the right time, personalize campaigns and improve your client relationships.
Leveraging Client Insights to Increase Revenue
Once you’ve gathered and identified client insights, you can develop ways to implement your findings into your business operations. These client insights can give you a deeper understanding of your business’s current performance and how it can improve while ensuring your consumers are satisfied.
Your sales strategies shouldn’t rely on guessing or assumptions about what your consumers like and need. To avoid that and enhance your sales performance, start leveraging those client insights and increasing your revenue by:
- Targeting Your High-Value Clients
- Customizing Product Offerings
- Optimizing Pricing
- Identifying Opportunities for Upselling and Cross-Selling
#1. Targeting Your High-Value Clients
You can use your client insights to target various segments of your consumer base, but targeting high-value clients can be especially rewarding. High-value customers are able — and likely — to spend more at your business and may even become repeat customers.
Once you know who your high-value clients are through consumer personas and other tools, you can create custom marketing efforts to target them specifically with ads and messaging to which they’re most likely to respond.
#2. Customizing Product Offerings
Client insights can be very helpful when considering your product offerings. These insights can help you identify what your most popular products and services are and what offerings don’t perform on the same level as others.
Client insights can also fuel product development. Say you notice your customers are inquiring about a product you don’t currently offer. This could be your opportunity to develop something your customers are searching for and interested in buying from you before they look to your competition.
#3. Optimizing Pricing
You can also use client insights to inform your pricing strategies. For example, if you notice you’re getting a lot of negative feedback about your high prices, you may consider offering sales and promotions more often, like opting to join your email list for 15% off their next purchase.
You can also use client insights here to implement loyalty programs. If you notice you have a segment of repeat customers, you can begin offering them tailored discounts and promotions to keep them brand loyal to you rather than your competition.
#4. Identifying Opportunities for Upselling and Cross-Selling
Client insights can help you better understand your consumer base, including how to get more revenue from them. You can use the client insights you gathered to segment your customers into different cohorts based on shared characteristics like age, location, and purchase habits.
You can then implement predictive analytics tools to identify who can and is likely to spend more money. Once these customers have been identified, you can start recommending products based on the client and their purchase history, thus garnering more purchases and higher profits.
Using Client Insights to Cut Costs
Not only can client insights be used to increase revenue, but they can also help cut costs your business faces. You may find that you’re spending too much in an area that isn’t providing your business a worthwhile return, or you may be wasting money on marketing efforts that aren’t working because you didn’t gather client insights and get to know your consumers.
There are several ways to leverage client insights to cut costs, including:
- Streamlining Product Offerings
- Reducing Customer Acquisition Costs
- Improving Customer Retention
- Identifying and Addressing Pain Points
#1. Streamlining Product Offerings
When you know your customer well, you can better tailor your products and services. You can use client insights to see your less popular products and services and then adjust your inventory accordingly, which can cut production costs for products you don’t need.
Similarly, you can use these client insights to drive further product development, fix potential issues, add features your customers may be asking for, and refine your offerings to fit your consumer’s evolving needs.
#2. Reducing Customer Acquisition Costs
Client insights can be helpful when looking for the most effective marketing channels to reach your customer base. Fine-tuning your targeting methods can help reduce customer acquisition costs and ensure you’re not wasting money on the wrong platforms.
You may find that you gain more paying customers through social media ads and promotions but don’t get much action from your email campaigns. To cut costs, you could drop your email strategy and focus your time and resources on social media instead.=
#3. Improving Customer Retention
Client insights can be very informative when identifying. Customer feedback, reviews, and survey responses can all indicate areas of your business that your customers struggle with, whether poor customer support, too high prices or fees, or even productivity complaints.
When you review client insights and listen to what your customers have to say, you’ll be able to make changes to address these pain points and work toward improving customer satisfaction, which in turn improves your customer retention.
Applying Client Insights to Drive and Enhance Business Strategies
Knowing how useful client insights can be in increasing revenue and cutting costs, it’s likely time for you to start applying these measures to your company to drive and enhance business strategies. There are several ways to do that with the help of client insights, such as:
- Developing Data-Driven Sales and Marketing Strategies
- Improving the Customer Experience
- Improving Your Brand Reputation
- Identifying New Market Opportunities
#1. Developing Data-Driven Sales and Marketing Strategies
Leveraging data — like client insights — can significantly improve your marketing and sales strategies. You may find that most of your paying customers interact with your brand and promotions on Instagram in the evening. Your marketing team can then take this information to craft a data-driven strategy to target this group.
Then your sales team can nurture the influx of leads generated by this data-driven targeted marketing campaign. Using client insights can close the gap between marketing and sales, increasing conversions and revenue.
#2. Improving the Customer Experience
Client insights will tell you what your customers want and need and what they’re both satisfied and unsatisfied with. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement based on feedback and reviews.
Addressing these areas needing improvement can help improve customer satisfaction and the customer experience as a whole. Making changes and improvements based on the information you obtain from listening to your customers can drive customer loyalty and retention because your company will see and hear them.
#3. Improving Your Brand Reputation
Client insights can carry valuable information regarding your brand reputation and what you can do to improve it. Customer experiences and feedback from online public reviews directly impact your brand’s reputation and brand loyalty.
Reviewing client insights and paying attention to feedback can allow you to stay on top of pain points, quickly make improvements as needed, and identify ways to enhance the customer experience, whether by tailoring your messaging or offering more promotions. This makes your customers happy and improves your brand reputation over time.
#4. Identifying New Market Opportunities
Through reviews, feedback, and survey responses, you may be able to use client insights to identify new market opportunities. If your customers ask for certain features or new products and offerings, you may have the opportunity to enter new markets and make more profits.
Developing strategies to enter and capitalize on these new markets can help your company evolve and improve over time, as well as improve both the customer experience and satisfaction levels, as you’ll be working to meet your customers’ wants and needs directly.
Conclusion
Client insights are the understanding of your customer’s data, including their behaviors and any feedback they provide, which can then be used to improve aspects of your business like product development, customer service, and the consumer experience as a whole.
Identifying client insights can provide actionable findings that can help you expand your business’s offerings while directly addressing your customer’s wants and needs. There are several ways to gather various client insights that can serve different purposes and even help to increase your company’s revenue and cut costs.
About the Author
Tiffany Perkins-Munn orchestrates aggressive strategies to identify objectives, expose patterns, and implement game-changing solutions with agility that transcends traditional marketing. As the Head of Data and Analytics for the innovative CDAO organization at J.P. Morgan Chase, her knack involves unraveling complex business problems through operational enhancements, augmented financials, and intuitive recruiting. After over two decades in the industry, she consistently forges robust relationships across the corporate spectrum, becoming one of the Top 10 Finalists in the Merrill Lynch Global Markets Innovation Program.
Dr. Perkins-Munn earned her Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology with an interdisciplinary focus on Advanced Quantitative Methods. Her insights are the subject of countless lectures on psychology, statistics, and real-world applications. As a published author, coursework developer, and Dissertation Committee Chair, Tiffany still finds time for family and hobbies. Her non-linear career path has given her an exclusive skill set that is virtually impossible to reproduce in another individual.
