Turn Research Data into Relevant Customer Acquisition Insights

Understanding research data is the foundation to a good customer acquisition plan.

Be Insightful About Your Business: Learn From Your Data

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After you’ve collected all your customer acquisition research data and verified its validity, you’re ready to move on from researching for your customer acquisition strategy to the planning stage, right?

Not exactly.

Without extracting insights, data is worthless. At my company, we’ve made insights a separate phase in our strategy process because it’s easy to assume that data alone tells us all we need to know. In reality, that’s rarely the case.

Data vs. Insights

Knowing that a particular campaign generated an increase of 10 percent in conversion rates is a data point, not an insight. To gather insight from that particular piece of data, we have to understand why that campaign sparked that increase. Did we change the consumer offer? Did we lose a competitor in the search listings? Did Oprah just recommend this product on national television?

Asking these questions gives us the ability to take action on our data. Whether customers love a new offer or a competitor has temporarily withdrawn from a certain market space tells us much more about why our campaign succeeded and allows us to replicate that success.

Why Gathering Insights Is So Tough

Homing in on the right data points to analyze can be difficult. Too much analysis of data often leads to what we call “analysis paralysis.”

Paring down the data gathered from the research process and turning it into actionable insights for our clients requires a singular focus on the client’s stated goal. If the insight won’t help our client meet the goal he or she stated in the beginning, we leave it on the cutting room floor without a second thought.

We like to imagine presenting our findings to our clients and hearing them ask, “Why did this happen?” or “Why should I care?” If we can’t answer those questions, we haven’t yet transformed data into insight.

These “why” questions are the essence of what helps us derive valuable lessons from available information. Even when a campaign fails, the “why” of the failure can provide much more information than a successful campaign that teaches us nothing new.

We like to gather insights from multiple vantage points, such as:

  • Social intelligence to identify pockets of potential new customers we may have overlooked.

  • Site performance and site learning to find friction points and opportunities to improve conversion rates or ease the ordering process.

  • Media optimization to show where our most efficient channels are and how we can improve our visibility.

Sometimes, insights can be backed up with data; other times, they can’t. In those cases, it’s important to run correlation tests to make sure data and insights align. For example, say a data point shows a media campaign is performing well. Further analysis could show that the customers it’s bringing in don’t stay for long and are therefore less valuable than we thought. Other methods might bring in fewer customers, but they might produce long-term customer relationships that are far more valuable.

Insights allow us to take things a couple steps further to identify what our data really means and how it can help us achieve the goals our clients care about most.

How to Turn Data Into Insights

Be Insightful About Your Business: Learn From Your Data

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Unfortunately, no tool exists that can take in data and spit out insights. The ability to form insights from data requires training and an inherently curious team that is passionate about finding what works, what doesn’t, and why – and then channeling that curiosity in a positive way.

During the insight-gathering process, we typically look at a few key variables, such as conversion rate, click-through rate, average order size, campaign success, and similar metrics. We train our team to look at particular areas within data sets to derive insights about performance, determine whether the results were positive or negative, and discover what led to that result. We have group discussions about our findings and ensure that any opinion that makes it into the mix is validated by fact before proceeding. There is no secret formula – just experience, skill, and dedication.

Data is ubiquitous, and more of it is available every day. With a seemingly endless supply of information, the art of taking that data and putting it into a valuable, usable format is just as important as the collection itself.

Once we have relevant insights, we can put them into action in the next phase: planning.


This is Part 2 of a three-part series.
Part 1: 3 Customer Acquisition Research Strategies You Should Be Using Now
Part 3: 3 Steps to Guide Your Customer Acquisition Planning Process

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