Legendary Baseball Hall of Famer and Yankees catcher Yogi Berra once said, "You can observe a lot by watching." The humor aside, there's a lot of truth in that statement.

As marketing professionals, we should always be observing our customers: Their habits, behavior, and feedback serve as a yardstick for measuring the strength of your company's relationship with its customers.

And if you're not watching your customers, someone else—probably your competition—is.

One way to understand customer metrics is to compare it to driving your car. When you're behind the wheel, there's a lot happening: You're constantly monitoring the vehicle's metrics, such as speed, engine temperature, and fuel levels, along with observing traffic and road conditions. There's no justification for not bringing the same level of monitoring to your customers.

So how can marketing professionals turn Mr. Berra's quip into an actionable plan?

The basic measurements most viewed are revenue and profitability. As long as those two are going up, why should anyone care? Simply put, as fast as these numbers go up... they can plummet. Customer preferences can change in a heartbeat... and if a company is caught flat-footed, next month's sales results won't look quite as rosy.

Having a strong understanding of your customers helps you spot warning signals before sales go completely south, as well as helping you to discover trends that can lead to new areas of growth and opportunity.

Here are five steps marketing professionals can take.

1. Continually monitor customer activity

Marketers should always be reviewing customer information. Metrics have quickly become the lifeblood of marketing, and modern measurement tools make it far easier than ever to produce stronger analyses in near real-time.

As data pours in, you should be reviewing primary results while keeping an eye on the secondary information:

  • Primary data refers to total sales, what products/services are the top sellers, the revenue generated, and the primary channel source.
  • Secondary information can provide insight into the geographic regions, time of day, type of customer, purchase volume, product category breakdown, and price levels.

So what are some of the most effective ways to gather customer insight? A strong customer relationship management (CRM) system, such as Salesforce, is one of the best tools available. It addition to being able to capture detailed customer contact information, a CRM solution allows you to analyze granular data and find common threads.

For example, you might discover customers in Chicago have a greater response rate to email than those in Los Angeles. Plus, these customers are most likely to purchase after receiving two emails. You may also learn that Chicago-area customers make their purchases on Saturdays from big warehouse stores, whereas Los Angeles-area customers are more likely to respond to a Facebook campaign and make the purchase on Friday night from a local chain store.

And if your business offers a loyalty program, that data can be taken into account to understand who the most frequent buyers are, where they live, and how often they buy your products. The information can also be used to identify other customers who fit a similar profile; and, hopefully, you can convert that segment into loyal customers, too.

2. Ask for input

You can get feedback from your customers in a lot of ways. Surveys are probably one of the most widely used vehicles, but companies need to move beyond just scratching the surface of customer insight.

Customer preferences can change in an instant, and trying to accurately measure customer behavior can at times seem like trying to nail Jello to a wall. But asking the right questions and using the proper feedback vehicle can help you get a clear understanding.

A basic survey asking about favorability toward a product is one method, but it's limited. Having customers rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5 is a start; though valuable and necessary, it gives you only a single data point of customer opinion, and it's difficult to ask follow-up questions to probe a bit deeper for insight into the intensity of the response.

In-person interviews/surveys can be more helpful. Selecting a handful of customers and asking open-ended questions lets you discover what keywords and phrases they use to describe your products, and give you an opportunity to keep an eye on their body language. These interviews always provide deep information that you can't get from just a standard survey.

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Five Ways to Gain Customer Insight: A Guide for Marketers

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Steve Hartert

Steve Hartert is chief marketing officer at JotForm, an online drag-and-drop form builder for online payments, contact forms, lead collection, surveys, registrations, applications, online booking, event registrations, and more.

LinkedIn: Steve Hartert