The best marketers are data-driven. This means that they use customer and website data to make smart decisions that accelerate the growth of a company. Smarter decisions are made because, by using data and analytics, you can get a much better understanding of your customers and what they want to do with your product.

When we talk about analytics, we mean more than just tracking pageviews. We mean examining unique sessions, durations of each session, page bounce rates, and other important information that allow you to understand user behavior on your website. When you understand your website and how people are using it, you can more rapidly optimize your site to accomplish business objectives.

What is customer data analytics?

Customer data analytics is information that allows you to understand what exactly the customer is doing. It is data that lets you know where and how people are using your product.

The most important thing to remember in regards to customer data analytics is that it is simply data collected from user actions. The more data that you collect, the better you’ll be able to view the journey that users are taking as they interact with your product.

When you see how people are interacting with your product clearly, you can make impactful marketing decisions. You will be able to see how people found your product, what features are being used most, what features likely need to be improved, how to improve the design of your product, and much more. The gist of customer data analytics is that it lets you better improve company growth.

For the rest of this post, we are going to talk about some ways that you can use customer data analytics to make the types of decisions that will grow your business.1. You can send much better emails.

When you use customer data to make improved marketing decisions, you can send much better emails. You can send much better emails because you can figure out what type of messaging will resonate best with your audience.

When you understand what resonates best with your audience you can decide on things such as:

• Should you send an email to people who abandon their purchase a few days after the cart abandonment?

• Send emails to people who perform certain actions in your product. For example, if a person completes an important task, you may send them an email congratulating them on accomplishing the task.

A few popular email tools that you can use to communicate with your users are: Intercom, Customer.io, MailChimp, or SendGrid.2. Use customer data to improve the design of your product.

Using customer data to improve the design of a product is one of the most neglecting things companies do. Most design decisions are made on gut feelings rather than using hard data, so if you use data to make design decisions you’ll often have a seriously huge business advantages over competitors.

You have a huge business advantage when you use customer data to improve the design of your product because you will be able to more easily identify problem areas. For example, you’ll be able to more quickly see that users are having trouble on your sign up page. You can use this finding to come up with smart ways to increase the bad conversion rate and make great design choices to accomplish this.

In addition to tools like Google Analytics, the following tools can also greatly improve the amount of valuable customer data and feedback that you collect.

• Drift, Intercom, and Olark. These three tools add live chat to your site so that you can more rapidly talk to your customers and users to gain valuable feedback.

• CrazyEgg, Lucky Orange, and Inspectlet. These tools make it so that you can record sessions and heat maps, meaning that you can understand how people are using and browsing the pages of your websites.

• Qualaroo and Survey Monkey. Both of these tools make it so that you can easily survey your website visitors and users.

Surveys are a brilliant way to gather customer data. They allow you to ask your audience questions about features and what they’re looking for. You can use this data to make design, product, and business decisions.Live chat makes it so that you can improve your sales and support. When you make it so that it’s easier for your customer to reach out to you, you can more easily identify areas of your design and product that are problematic.Heat mapping and session tracking are one of our favorite customer data gather tools. They allow you to see where people are pressing on your webpages and if they are getting stuck on certain pages. When you use these types of tools, you will be able to make very smart design decisions.

Now what?

While there are many more ways that you can use customer data to improve marketing, the two that we spoke about are some of our favorites.

In additional to the tools above, we are big fans of Kissmetrics. We like Kissmetrics because it allows us to collect a lot of data for making marketing decisions. For example, we can look at activation, retention, do cohort analysis, and much more. It’s one of the best marketing optimization tools out there.We also recommend that you try LeadBoxer. We recommend using LeadBoxer because it allows you to see your website traffic at a granular level. This means that you can understand if your marketing is making your target audience land on your website. It does this by taking a lot of anonymity out of your website traffic, allowing you to see who (people and companies) are browsing your website.