How Can Small Businesses Leverage Customer Insights to Increase Sales?

In the modern world, customers expect high-quality products and services accompanied by high-quality experience. Customer insights are an important tool that can provide businesses with the information they need to exceed customer expectations. By leveraging customer insights, businesses can easily get in-depth knowledge about current and potential buyers. 

When a business knows enough about its customers, it helps in smoothening the customer journey, increasing sales, and opening doors for new business opportunities. For small businesses, customer insights are as important as their other resources. By simply analyzing the data they have collected from email lists, customer purchases, social media, and other sources, SMBs can gain important insights into their customers and use this knowledge to improve the way they do business. 

What are Consumer Insights?

Before we focus on what customer insights are, let’s talk a little about what customer insights are. In simple terms, customer insights are the understanding and interpretation of customer data, buying behavior, and reviews that businesses can use to improve their product, services, and customer support. 

These insights give businesses a bird-eye view to better understand customer behavior and build their strategies in accordance with that. As businesses can get a deeper understanding of what their customers expect from them, business owners can make their plans accordingly. 

As the customer support team is usually the one that collects most of the data about the customers, they must ask the relevant questions to know their customers a little more while not sounding like they are interrogating them. 

How to Use Customer Insights to Boost Sales?

Here are a few simple ways that can help any small business leverage customer insights to increase its sales. 

• Make Email Marketing More Effective:
  By using customer data, businesses can significantly improve their email efforts. It’s been found that including the recipient’s name in the email can boost engagement to a certain level. Based on the site browsing history, businesses can send automated follow-up emails to remind users of the product or service they recently browsed. If the information in the email is customized as per the customers, they would be more interested in opening, reading, and acting on the emails.  

• Create Custom Offers:
  Modern customers respond well to businesses that offer tailored services. Customer insights facilitate this and help businesses understand their customers and interact better with them. This also helps in strengthening their customer bases and building brand loyalty. Small businesses can use customer information like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. to target customers and make them feel special that they end up buying from you. Based on what products or services customers buy and when they buy them, businesses can send promotional offers to bring the customer back. 

• Improve Customer Support:
  When it comes to customer support, the more data, the better it becomes. It’s important for a business to understand its customers and provide support accordingly. A lot of businesses provide their customer support executives with customer-related data so that they can understand the customer relationship with their brand and customize their conversation accordingly. 

• Better Inventory Planning:
  With the help of sales data, businesses can accurately forecast the amount of inventory they need for their business. This will also save your business from having excess products that your customers are no longer interested in. 

• Target the Right Audience:
  Every business wants to target those customers in particular who are more likely to buy from them. With great insight into customer buying history and related data, businesses can target specific promotions to these customers. With efficient promotions, businesses can increase their operating margins by 60%. 

• Determine Optimal Product/Service Pricing:
  It’s obvious that your customers would be happy to buy from you if your products/services were cheaper than your competitors. Otherwise, they will find their own reasons to not buy from you. As per the statistics, because of the wrong pricing decision by the retailers, they suffer losses. By analyzing the customers, businesses can get an idea of the market and effectively set the pricing for their products and services and make great returns.

• Expand into New Markets:
  It’s essential for businesses to understand which markets are getting them great results and which ones are not. As soon as they find out that they are selling in an underperforming market, they must leave as soon as possible. With customer insights, they can determine what new markets they must consider entering and which areas they must stop targeting to improve their ROI. 

• Developing New Features and Products:
  By analyzing your business data every now and then, you can develop future versions of your services and products. Your customer support team is on the front lines and talks to your customers. No department in your company is as close to your customers as the customer support team. So, you can go through those conversations and see what features you miss to offer. You can ask your support team to ask the customers about the features they would like your business to offer. 

• Winning Back Customers:
  When you are tracking everything about your business, you will come to know about the visit frequency of your customers. If you note that it’s declining, you can use the insights to win back your customers. If a customer has not visited you back in some time, you can send them a message and remind them of your brand and even make some special offers and give them a reason to return. 

Gaining customer insights is an ongoing process that requires businesses to maintain their existing customer base, attract new customers, and improve customer experience. A business that measures the success of its team’s efforts over and over again often knows how to tweak its operations to keep winning customers. 

To help you with this, a sales CRM is the right tool that you must invest in. It can automatically collect customer data and present it in reports to help you get an idea of your customers and business. Based on these reports, you can plan your future moves and avoid doing what isn’t working.