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5 tips to help you successfully use behavioral data

In this webinar, our partner Human37 shared some of the experience they have regarding behavioral analytics and how it can drive business growth. Everyone has data, but very few know how to activate it, and that is something that needs to change because customer data holds a lot of insights on how customer experiences could and should be.

Human37 is a Customer Data Strategy Agency, and its mission is to build a world where customers get the best experiences from brands.

behavioral-data

What is Behavioral data?

Behavioral data captures how your customers and users interact with your products and services. Common sources of behavioral data include websites, mobile apps, CRM systems, marketing automation systems, call centers, help desks etc Behavioral analytics or event-based analytics has been around the industry for quite a while but has been accelerated recently due to the arrival of GA4. It allows for granular insights into the behavior of consumers on eCommerce platforms, online games, web and mobile applications, and IoT.

Why is behavioral data so important?

Behavioral data helps you to better understand your customers and how they act across each channel and what influences their actions (conversion, churn, upsell…). Therefore, it allows you to predict the future by anticipating your customer's needs and behavior.

How to successfully use behavioral data?

Tip #1: Behavioral data needs to be part of a process

As said before, a lot of companies have data, but very few companies succeed in building better experiences using them. However, everybody agrees that we live in an experience driven economy. Therefore, you need to have a process in place that facilitates customer experience and delight. And as a result, you will get business growth from it. Everything starts with having proper and rational data collection on how customers are interacting with your brand, regardless of the interface that could be on the web.

The next step is to turn data into insights. A lot of companies are collecting data. But very few companies know how to turn it into insights and even fewer companies are able to turn it into customer experiences and delight. That’s a shame because it is the whole concept of why we collect data.

Tip #2: Build a democratic data architecture

Not all data is equal. It usually comes from different sources and uses different structures. Optimizing your data structure is a key element… If the collection layer is not optimized, you will be dealing with suboptimal tracking which creates problematic data ingestion, which creates in return nightmare analysis, and finally which results in no analysis or failure. That is why event-based measurement requires you to think through the tracking plan. Optimal tracking leads to data democratization. Indeed, data democratization allows people to understand what is going on in an event-based measurement schema or behavioral data. Basically, you have an event and a number of properties that are linked to it.

Tip #3: Write minimal viable documentation

End every implementation by creating a piece of (MV) documentation. It will change your life as a member of the data team as it:

  • Allows for self-onboarding.

  • Ensures continuity when someone leaves the organization.

  • Ensures we can spend time, effort and resources on building and going forward rather than figuring out what’s in place.

  • It makes using your data scalable. Maximises your chances to unearth valuable insights.

In the last few years, with the increase of SaaS products and platforms, there's been a lot of very good documentation platforms or even platforms that are not necessarily designed for documentation that can be used as such. For example, you can use platforms such as Confluence, Notion, Slab or Coda…

Tip #4: Make data accessible beyond Marketing

Surveys show that today, marketing teams own the tool stack and behavioral analytics is seen as something that is linked to marketing. Therefore, marketing departments should be one of the owners or one of the consumers of the data. But analytics should also be consumed by way more teams, especially when you are talking about behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics allows for very granular measurements. It means that we can measure very specific actions and provide a lot of context. It means that we can track if somebody clicks a specific button, where that button was placed, which color it had, etc. The future of behavioral analytics and analytics as a whole, is that there is not one set of data or multiple sets of data that are being consumed by one type of persona. There is actually one set of data, a handful of roles and hundreds of use cases that can be deployed.

Tip #5: Data is worthless if not ACTIVATED

Data is only valued when the insights are put into production. Organizations often don’t activate the data because they don't have the culture in order to foster this, because the use cases are often more complex than they should be. But activating data can be very simple. It can range from better website design, better app design, better campaign flows, better onboarding flows. See the examples in the video.

Sit back, relax and enjoy this talk