7 Powerful Customer Profile Templates For Your Marketing Campaigns

7 Powerful Customer Profile Templates For Your Marketing Campaigns

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Introduction

Do you know why customer profile templates are critical?

They’re super important because you have better ways to spend your time than to be designing new customer profiles when you run new marketing campaigns.

In this article, we’ll be giving away examples and describe the best practices to save you time and money so you can be more effective in marketing, and measure how well your sales campaigns are working.

53% of marketers say they have “too much to do with too little time.” This means marketers need templates to automate tasks and save as much time as possible. Customer profile templates are one of the methods used to focus effort optimally and avoid wasted energy.

customer profile template

Why do you need a customer profile template ? 

Customer profile templates help you save time. They provide a pattern for you to build your customer profiles for any campaign you’re working on.

However, building a customer profile template that rightly describes your buyers begins with in-depth research.

The more in-depth the research on your customer is, the better your marketing campaign will be. And by extension, a great customer profile helps your marketing campaign target the right people.

In this article, we’ll look at four customer profile templates (examples) for B2C and three for B2B businesses. Let’s start by exploring a variety of B2C customer profile examples you can work with.

B2C Customer Profile Templates

B2C basically refers to the type of transaction in which businesses sell products or services directly to consumers.

So here are four customer templates you can use to describe a B2C customer:

B2C customer profile example #1: Animal Loving John

Our first example is from a Dribbble User. This customer profile is as explanatory as they come.

customer profile template

This customer profile layout describes the customer’s current feelings, frustrations, and his needs. All of that information in your customer profile helps you understand what role your product or service will play in the daily lives of your target customers.

B2C customer profile example #2: Rachel, The Stay At Home Mum

You can get a good idea of who Rachel is, in this example, by learning about her background, lifestyle and challenges.

customer profile template

It’s simple and easy to understand as it displays the information of the customer in bullet points and the sentences are concise. No lengthy story here to describe the customer, just some points that are easy to act on.

B2C customer profile example #3: Stressed Susan

The customer profile example #2 above portrays Rachel as a customer who has her life together. Conversely, Sarah’s life, in this customer profile example from UX Mastery, does not seem so perfect. She’s overwhelmed and in need of help.

customer profile template

Not all businesses need a customer profile that describes their customers’ challenges to this extent, but many businesses do. For example, a health-related organization will include all possible medical issues a customer can have but may not take into consideration their financial profile.

On the other hand, a financial services company will include their customer’s financial issues in a customer profile rather than focus on health or marital issues a customer may have — unless there’s some connection between such customer challenges and their services.

But in general, and for most businesses, knowing your customer’s life, business or family challenges helps you more effectively create an amazing customer profile and, in the long run, great marketing campaigns.

B2C customer profile example #4: Trendy Brandi

This customer profile example from Indie Game Girl describes how Brandi Tyler, a woman with extremely narrow feet, has searched high and low for comfortable, stylish shoes. The specific details in the buyer profile help you see the process a customer like Brandi goes through when she needs to purchase shoes.

customer profile template

Knowing the customer to this extent also provides something extra to help you fully understand their frustrations. This customer profile also includes actual quotes gathered from surveys and interviews, lending insight into the personality of the people you are trying to reach with your campaign.

As stated in the Best Practices section above, interviews and surveys should be organized in order to glean accurate information to create the best possible customer profile. Real quotes were included in the above example, giving the profile a more personal touch.

If you’re a B2B business, here are three customer templates you can use to describe a customer:

B2B customer profile templates

As a B2B brand, you’re typically dealing with professional buyers or high-level executives. This means your customer profiles should target business owners, policymakers and people who influence and make decisions in their respective industries/organizations.

So while the B2C customer profile examples above heavily focus on individual customers, the B2B examples below include more specific details about the buyer’s workplace, their job role and how important they are within the organization. And if your target buyer is not always in charge of making purchasing decisions, you need to include that detail in your customer profile as well.

B2B customer profile example #1: Technical Decision Maker

Here’s how one customer profile example from Referral SaaSquatch shows how much more information about buying decisions can be included in a customer profile. It shows that the customer is the decision-maker and also influences the organization’s purchasing choices.

customer profile template

One key difference between the B2C and B2B customer profile examples is that this example has more detail — what internal influences can affect the customer’s purchasing decision, their attitude, how long-form content is his preferred content type.

B2B customer profile example #2: John Johnson

This ClearVoice customer profile is a great example of a concise B2B buyer profile. It explains who John is and provides the necessary information about his job position as well as his capacity to make or influence decisions in his company — as a marketing manager.

customer profile template

This example shows how you can be succinct and accurate when creating your customer profile and still drive home your point about an ideal buyer. This is especially useful when you have a campaign to run on a tight schedule.

B2B customer profile example #3: Diane, The Director

The last example is one of the finest customer profile templates around, and it’s from Buffer. Meet Diane, the Director:

customer profile template

It’s a jam-packed customer profile template. One of the key features you can appreciate about this customer profile is the way the details are placed around the image in such a way that it is easy to scan through.

Looking at this, you can quickly learn everything you need to know about Diane. Outside the regular demographic information, you can learn about her goals and values, the problems she faces daily, her job role (and who she reports to), her information sources and the experience she seeks when searching for products and services.

But in general, when building your customer profiles, you need to consider the following elements — depending on whether you’re a B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business) brand:

Customer profile elements for B2C brands:

  • Customer’s personal demographics:

— What is the age range of the target customer?

— Where do they live?

— Are they all male or female or mixed?

  • Customer’s educational background:

— What level of education did they attain?

— What did they study?

  • Customer’s socioeconomic status:

— What is their annual income?

— Can they afford what you are offering them?

  • Job title/Role:

— What is their job title and how long have they been in that role?

— Are they self-employed or salaried employees?

Customer profile components for B2B brands:

  • Value Proposition:

— How does your product or service improve their business?

— Identify the problems you are trying to solve.

  • Nature and Size of the business:

— What industry category do they fall into?

— Which industry do they serve?

— What is the number of employees?

  • The Customer’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

— What problem are they trying to solve for their own customers?

— What is your customer’s USP?

But while creating your customer profile, whether for B2B or B2C, you need to understand some ground rules (best practices) that will ensure your customer profiles make a definitive impact on your marketing. 

Here are four key customer profile best practices you should follow:

 
  • Focus on the rationale behind behaviours: Understand “why” the customer is doing A, B or C.
  • Humanize customers (fictional or otherwise) with a real picture: Include a headshot of a specific customer in your customer profile template. Preferably, get the headshot of a real customer from their social account (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) and put it on your customer profile. This helps you keep in mind, as you run campaigns, that your customers are real people; sometimes it’s easy to forget that
  • Build your marketing strategy by sticking to three or four customer profiles: Use three or four primary customer profiles to represent who your ideal customers are — because your customers don’t all have one personality. Veteran marketer Mark Schaefer estimates 90%+ of sales come from 4 to 5 types of buyers.

Identify your ideal customers and use their characteristics to build your customer profile. You can look at an existing customer’s social media profile — LinkedIn, for instance — and identify salient characteristics about them. You can also hold interviews with some of your best customers and get a better understanding of their daily lives and what makes them draw their wallets. Download a free sample script and process that helps you setup an interview and understand your customers better.

  • Weave customer information into a story: Convert all the raw, demographic data gotten from research about your ideal customer into a story. This helps your team connect better to the customer when they understand all the elements used to build the profile.

But remember, developing your customer profile is only one of the first steps of a successful marketing or sales campaign. Think of it as the cornerstone that empowers your campaign to reach your target audience and convert them into customers.

How to get correct customer profile information

The best personas are created from real surveys and interviews — not from ballpark guesses, conjecture or assumptions, says Schaefer.

You can, of course, take wild guesses about your customers and stuff their profiles with misleading data. Or you can use a tool that helps you accurately pinpoint customer data. OpenTracker is one such tool. 

Opentracker helps you profile your website visitors and helps you identify key characteristics like:

  • Your customer’s location — OpenTracker helps you identify where the bulk of your customers are coming from. The tool helps you generate accurate reports so you can target the right buyers and drive them to your business.customer profile template
  • Identify the activities of visitors on your site. Opentracker is a very robust and powerful analytics tool as it can identify users and tag them so you can follow them or look them up through time. Just enter their details directly into the Visitor’s profile. This is especially useful for email marketing campaigns and tracking hot prospects.
  • Beyond giving you details on which devices your customers are using to access your website, you can combine Opentracker with LinkedIn and/or Facebook. Learn how to build insights with Linkedin or Facebook, download the free course here.

Get started with Opentracker for free.

How to Run Google Ads

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How To Run Google Ads

CONTENTS

  1. Vocabulary
  2. What are Google Ads
  3. Setting Up Your Ad

VOCABULARY

  1. Objective – What you want the ad to accomplish
  2. Keyword – a google search that is related to your product (what a customer might type to find your product)
  3. CTR (Click-through-rate) – the percentage of people that click on your ad after seeing it

WHAT ARE GOOGLE ADS?

Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is an online advertising platform. Google ads can work for any product or service because people search Google for almost any and everything.

One strong suit of Google Ads is that the system is centered around showing your ads to people who are ALREADY looking for a solution that your product or something similar will offer, as opposed to a lot of other forms of advertisement that may show it to people way outside your target audience.

The pricing system is pay-per-click (PPC). This means that you do not pay except the ad actually gets people to click on it and get to your chosen landing page/website. You can set your maximum bid for each click (Google Ads pricing works with a bidding system) and Google Ads will not spend more than that from your account. Payment could be CPC cost-per-click, CPM (cost-per-mille i.e. cost per 1000 impressions) or CPE (cost-per-engagement).

Google Ads, generally, averages an 8% click-through rate. With almost 250 million  different visitors and about 700 million dollars return on investment from the 2.3 million searches that Google gets every second, you can be sure that there are a lot of potential customers on the platform for your brand or business. The exception is that Google Ads does not support ads for products or services that are:

  • Dangerous e.g. weapons, recreational drugs
  • Inappropriate or offensive e.g. bullying and racial discrimination
  • Advocative of dishonest practices e.g. hacking software, fake documents

Types of Google Ads

There are five different types (also called campaigns) of google-ads namely: 

1. Search: These are the types, in text form, you see at the top of the result page when you make a google search. Ads can also be created to appear in Google Maps.

2. Display: These show up on Gmail and other websites that are a part of the GDN (Google Display Network) like youtube, gmail. etc. alongside relevant content, Google Display Networks have 180 million impressions per month. 

3. Shopping campaigns: These can show off your products with images and include links to your business page.

Source: Search Engine Land

4. Video: Ads shown on YouTube by the side bar and also placed when playing videos.


5. App: These promote your app on Google Search, YouTube, Google Play and other platforms to advertise to the right people.


 

Objectives of Google Ads

You can choose the goal you want to accomplish for your brand from the list of laid out objectives that will be shown to you in the process of setting up your ad. This list is comprised of the following:

  1. Sales
  2. Leads
  3. Website Traffic
  4. Product and Brand Consideration
  5. Brand Awareness
  6. App Promotion

 

SETTING UP YOUR ADs

There are 3 stages to setting up your Google Ads Ad:

  • Create Campaign
  • Create Ad group
  • Create Ad in Ad Group

Before you start creating your campaign, it’s best you do some research on the most effective keywords for your niche.

There is a tool in Google Adwords that can help you do this, but you must have created your first campaign to have access to it. It’s called ’Google Ads Keywords’.

You can create a campaign, use the Keyword Planner and then edit your keywords for that ad. However, sites like keywords.io, ahref can help you with this before your first campaign is created.

  1. You must have a Gmail address to run a Google Ad.
  2. Go to Google Ads.com and click ‘Start Now’ at the top right corner of the page.
  3. At the bottom middle, click on “Switch to Expert Mode”

i. You’ll see an outline of different objectives. Select the one that is most relevant to you. For This example, ”Website Traffic”

a. Select web-site traffic.
b. Select the type of ad you want to run e.g. ‘search-based’
c. Input your website
d. Click continue.

e.Create your campaign

    1. Name your campaign (this won’t show on the ad)
    2. Deselect ‘search-network’ and ‘display-network’ if you don’t want your ad shown on the sidebar of other websites outside Google. Since Google seems to be more effective than its search partners, unchecking this box should save you some money.
    3. Set your start-date and end-date. If you don’t set an end-date, the ad will continue to run and you will continue to be charged.
    4. Select the location(s) where you want people to see your ad e.g. your country. (the more specific you are, the more the ad might cost you).

Instead of typing in a specific location, you can also set the ad to run within a specific-mile radius from a particular point e.g. a 30-mile radius from your store.

    1. Select the language you want your ad displayed in.
    2. Set your budget. You can start small and see how effective the ad is.  
      A very low budget like 1USD per day might not give you an accurate representation of how effective Google Ads is for your business because it is likely to afford you just a couple clicks.

You can set a maximum CPC. You can also experiment with this and see how it works .

Choosing accelerated means Google will spend your budget as quickly as possible, Standard means your budget will be spread over the course of your ad’s lifespan.

In additional settings, you can do things like set a time schedule for your ad to run, if you want it to run for specific periods during the day. You can also add more business information and your prices to your ad, amongst other things.

  1. Click ‘Save and Continue’.

f. Create an Ad Group

    1. Name your ad group (this won’t show up on the ad itself)
    2. Enter the phrases/keywords you want to trigger your ad. Once you have set up your account (which we’re doing right now), you’ll have access to Google Keyword Planner which will help subsequently in helping you choose the most precise and profitable keywords for your product or service.

There are also other tools that you can use to take the guesswork out of the game, even for your first attempt e.g. keywords.io

In inserting your keywords, you can type it in 4 different formats for 4 different effects, these effects are called ‘matches’.

      • Broad match: If you enter your keywords in this format: dresses for babies, it will give a broad match to those words and anything related e.g. baby clothes, baby things.
      • Modified broad match: In this format, you put the plus sign before words that you want to be in the Google search mandatorily e.g. +baby clothes (if someone searches ‘infant clothes’, the ad won’t show up) or baby +clothes (if the user types in ‘baby apparel’, the ad will not come up.
      • Phrase match: If you enter the keyword in quotation marks like so “dresses for babies”, it’ll give a narrower match to google searches that contain that exact phrase e.g. if someone searches ‘dresses for baby’, your ad won’t show up but if someone typed ‘colorful dresses for babies’ or ‘dresses for babies discount’, your ad will be displayed.
      • Exact match: Entering your keyword in square brackets allows a match with the exact phrase and no other additional word. It has been modified to include searches with synonyms or reordered phrases e.g. if your keyword is [dresses for babies], it will match with searches that say ‘dresses for babies’, ‘dresses for infants’, ‘babies for dresses’.

Each keyword can be entered in multiple formats in one ad, if you so wish, for any reason.

A column on the side will show you an estimate of how many clicks you could get with those keywords and how much it would cost you.

    1. Click ‘Save and Continue’.

g. Create Ad

      1. You can use split-testing and split your budget between multiple ads under one ad group so you can see which one works best and continue to use that one in the future.

Tip: Make sure to assign tangible amounts of money to each ad so you can get an accurate reflection of its effectiveness.

      1. Insert your 2 headlines. Try something catchy, maybe add a

discount to the second headline.

      1. Insert your descriptions.
      2. Save and Continue.
      3. Insert payment info and if you have a promo code, insert that also.
      4. Submit.

Congratulations! You just created your first campaign.

Tools to optimize your Google Ad:

      1. Now that you’ve set up an ad, you can make use of the Google Keywords Planner Tool to optimize your ads.

Click on explore your campaign.

To create a new campaign, go to All Campaigns” and click on the plus sign.

      1. Monitor the insights that Google Ads gives you on how well ads are doing. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not so you can further optimize your ads in the future and gain more bang for your buck.
      2. Negative keywords: These stop your ad from being shown in search results if someone uses certain words along with your keywords e.g. discount or babies if you don’t give discounts or sell clothes only for adults. It also stops Google from bidding your set price/budget against the advertisers that want to use that/those keywords.
        • Click on keywords
        • Add negative keywords
        • Save

You can also create a negative keywords list to use in the future by clicking ‘Explore Campaign’, then ‘Tools and settings’ then Negative keywords list. When you’ve named it and created the list (it can be one or two words long), click on it, then click on “Apply to Campaigns’ to apply it to all or some of your campaigns.

Tip: You can use Ubersuggest.io to find negative keywords for your brand

      1. Google keyword planner:
        • Click Explore Campaign
        • Click on tools and settings at the top-right corner of your screen
        • Click Keyword Planner. Two bars will come up.

-You can use the first to find new keywords, see how much each will cost you, how much competition each keyword has (you want to pick the ones with low competition but relatively high searches; compared to others on the list).
-The second bar will help you see potentially how well your ad might do -this will help you ‘discover new keywords’ that you can use and see how well existing keywords do for other ads e.g. the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions).

      1. When you click on a particular campaign, you can change certain settings like what types of devices your ads are shown on by clicking the tab that says ‘devices’ on the lower left portion of the screen. Selecting the most likely option for your business removes the risk of your budget being used to show your ad on devices that are irrelevant to your business.

THINGS TO NOTE:

      1. You can choose to pause or even stop your ad at any point in time you so wish. You can even adjust your budget after it starts running.
      2. One campaign can have more than one ad group and one ad group can have more than one ad in it
      3. The more clicks you get, the less your CPC becomes.
      4. if you will be creating a large number of campaigns, you can use an app/tool called ‘Google Adwords Editor’ to help you out with managing them.
      5. If you’re managing multiple accounts for multiple clients, you need to first create a managers account.

You can then create your clients’ accounts under that and start from there. You can use one email for both the manager s account and up to 20 client accounts.

      1. To track conversions, you need to define what a conversion is to you: leads, sales, signups, phone calls from your settings. This will help you know which ad is working and which is not, know what time of day your ads are most effective etc.

Conclusion.

Remember Google shows your ad to who is looking for you. You have the ability to advertise to individuals that want to find you. This step-by-step guide covered the necessary knowledge you need to have before, during and after creating your first google ad. From Knowing the types of google ads, creating your campaign account, drafting your ad, picking a suitable keyword to tracking and measuring your first google ads.

 
 
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User Engagement Metrics

User Engagement Metrics – What They Are – Why You Need Them

How to increase your ROI by tracking the right metrics.

Do you ever wonder if your product or service would sell? Do you ever wonder whether your audience will find your products valuable?

Every Smart Marketeer is concerned about this.

When you start or run a business, ask questions like these to yourself: what kind of service am I providing? what kind of product am I selling? to whom am I providing or selling this to? is the price within their budget? and, how will I make them loyal customers to my brand?

Answering these questions as honestly as you can, creating a buyer persona, setting your price, and finally crafting an effective marketing strategy will determine the kind of ROI you’ll get from your marketing efforts.

But an iron-clad marketing strategy isn’t enough. You need feedback as your business grows. You need to see how your users behave. Track this user behavior and use the data to improve your services.

If you don’t track it, you won’t know it. If you don’t know it, you can’t improve it. Hence, you lose money instead of increasing profits

How?

Let’s take an instance;

Two competing companies were visited by similar users over a period of one year.

Business A and B are both online women-only clothing and accessories stores.

Business A tracks their user engagement. At the weekly marketing meeting, they tell each other stories about what the users are doing.

They are currently focusing their efforts on getting users to make return purchases.

Take a look at their main metrics for the last month:

With the results above, they were able to plan the following:

Business A discovered that the majority of their purchases came from Ad spend – they decided to spend more time and effort on retargeting ads on abandoned cart users, baiting the ads with discounts to get more returning traffic. At the same time they want to strengthen their emailing list, so that they can become less dependent on ad spend.

They checked the profiles of churned users and realized that they consisted mostly of unmarried men, not the ideal customer for a women’s only clothing store.

They decided to:

– Not target their ads to single men, and

– add a pop up for bouncing users to know why they are leaving. Is it the website design, speed or plain lack of interest?

They will be reviewing the results beginning next quarter.

From the tracking results, they were able to segment their audience and decide the kind of emails to send:

– upsell complementary items for first time customers who purchased on the first session,

– send out omens of concern to users who abandon their carts, and

– incise loyal customers to fill in Get-a-Discount-For-Feedback survey.

They continually check the profiles of customers that purchase and target people with similar profiles once a pattern emerges. They experiment to see what type of upsells are working.

With the results Business A got from tracking their user engagement, they now have the power of segmentation, a better understanding of who their customer is, and the ability to plan the next year with intentionality.

They know how to improve their sales by crafting the targeted ads to be more tailored and personal.

Their email marketing efforts are improving and they are creating surveys with higher response rates, and relevant data-points. As long as they continually take action based on their findings, they are likely to improve their ROI in the coming years.

Business B on the other hand does not track its user engagement. Their marketing team meets often to debate strategies and the best debater often determines the direction and marketing spend. As a result, they have a very good idea of direction, but spend almost no time testing their ideas in the market by focusing on customer metrics.

They target the same demographics year over year, thinking a bad year will come and go. And when they target a different group, it’s based on motivations echoed during the marketing team’s quarterly strategic debate. Marketing means spending time and money on SEO but it’s not known if it achieves desired returns. The head of marketing is convinced that SEO is getting results, but there is no data to back it up.

Overall, they are making choices because of what they think instead of what their users and customers are telling them through their own behaviour. There is no story based on data.

A customer’s experience highly affects their engagement and in turn your sales. If you don’t address their needs and quell their objections, they leave and become one time customers. As a result, you’ll lose money or make less than what you could have. Studies show customers don’t mind brands tracking their habits as long as it improves their experience.

Customers are the pillars of a brand. Using your user engagement analysis as a means to improve their experience will make them loyal to your brand. They may become advocates and recommend your products and services to others. This gives your brand a type of trust that you wouldn’t get with other marketing efforts.

Key customer engagement statistics

Key customer engagement statistics

Statistics chart from financeonline.com

One time customers generate short term sales and short-term profits. Conversely, long-term returning customers generate long-term sales and then long-term profits. We are pretty sure you prefer the latter.

In case you’re still unclear about what User Engagement is, here’s a concise definition:

User Engagement is an evaluation of how people respond to your brand’s offering. It could be a service or a product.

User Engagement can be assessed in so many forms, like the number of views on a site, number of page shares, number of clicks on your ads, bounce rate, etc. The type of metric you use to assess engagement largely depends on your company and what you’re offering.

For instance:

Company Type Actions to be considered as an engagement
Visual Content Site
  • Liking/commenting on a post.
  • Reading a post.
  • Sharing a post.
Invoicing software
  • Creating an invoice.
  • Adding a new customer to send an invoice to.
  • Receiving payment
Online Survey application
  • Creating a survey.
  • Sending out a link to your survey.
  • Sharing survey site to someone.

Important User Engagement Metrics

Here are a few key important metrics, in as much as they’re subjective to your brand, they’re the KPIs that will be relevant and useful to any brand.

  1. Users: users are a vital aspect of your brand, various ways you can track your users include measuring your Active Users (daily, monthly or yearly active users, you can use this information to know the kind of visitors you have overtime.

If they fit into your customer profile, what products or pages they interact with the most, the users that keep coming back over time, and where they come from.

2. Sessions: A session happens when a user or a customer spends time on your app or website. With this metric, you can determine how often each person engages with your app or website.

3. Session Duration:

How long users stay before they leave. – knowing how much time users spend on your app/site will help you know how engaging it is and how best to improve it.

4. Retention rate: This is the number of users that return and become long term customers.

Tracking this metric will help you identify who your loyal customers are, who to maybe give discount codes, send Feedback-surveys to and also use their profiles to retarget ads if need be.

5. Churn/bounce rate: This is the opposite of retention rate, it’s the number of users that leave your site, after the first click, visit or overtime.

You can use this to compare your retention rate to the churn rate. Know the kind of users that leave and maybe send a survey asking what made them leave, so you can improve.

6. Acquisition: This is the root of where your users come from was it a referral? Ads? , organic search? Social media? or a Paid search?

Understanding where your interactions come from so you can budget your customer acquisition cost better, decide what marketing activity to focus on and what to spend less effort on.

7. Screen flow: With this metric, you can see what your customers /users interact with the most.

Find out what makes them have longer sessions, what triggers them to leave – With this, you can restructure and redesign your app or website based on the results you get.

All of these metrics are interrelated and it’s the best when you track them together in a dashboard, rather than independently.

It’s not just these metrics that matter. There are other engagement metrics and engagement actions that depend on the kind of business you run. Cart abandonment rates matter for eCommerce brands, number of comments for blogs and usage frequency for SaaS brands.

Picking the right one for your business is imperative, because not every metric is worth tracking. Not every metric is germane to your brand’s goals and growth. In fact defining just a few metrics to guide you or your team is better than defining too many risking information overload.

Tools to help you track your user engagement metrics

After knowing the what and the why, the how is what completes the circle of growth. In this case the how is by investing in analytics tools that will make it easier for you to understand how your users engage and use the results to improve your brand.

Once you can measure it, you can improve it.

  1. Opentracker:

Image of Opentracker's dashboard Image of Opentracker’s dashboard

This software can be used on your website or app. It will give you a detailed overview of where your visitors come from, what keywords they use to find you, and how long they stay on your site, how many times they’ve visited, if your link was shared, and even the city they’re from. This is the holy grail for measuring your user engagement, you have everything all on one, – metrics that will greatly improve your SEO efforts, better-target your ads based on their profiles, and overall brand performance.

Book a free consultation with OpenTracker to get started!

2. Google Analytics:

This software is the swiss army knife of analytics. It can be integrated with Shopify or Oberlo – it helps you measure performance, segment traffic based on actions, and understand how many actions are performed.

 3.HotJar:

This is a heat map tool that helps you see what needs to be improved on your website. It helps you determine if people reach important content, follow the main links, buttons, and CTAs, and/or experience issues across devices while browsing your site. When you use heatmaps on business-critical pages (including your homepage, product and checkout pages), you make sure you are always creating a great experience for your users.

4.Survey Monkey:

This is a survey software that can help you create custom surveys to get feedback from your customers.

STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE YOUR USER ENGAGEMENTS RATES.

Two key things to always keep in mind when creating a user engagement strategy is – listen to your customers and – keep them happy.

  1. App/Website Speed: 70% of Customers say speed affects their busting decisions, if your app or website is slow or below average and you don’t improve, you are losing potential customers.
  2. Create a customer profile for your brand: Having a profile helps you target the right persons otherwise you’d be wondering why your ads are not effective. It’s because you don’t have an idea of what your ideal buyer should look like. Here’s how to do so and a cheat sheet to help.
  3. Personalizing your brand: Be relatable, customers love it when they can relate to a brand. They feel understood. Personalization starts when you can call them by name. Creating a target profile will take you a long way. 96% of Marketers agree that personalizing their brands improves their customer’s experience.
  4. Efficient customer service/support: Be reachable: Consumers are willing to spend 17% more on a company that has outstanding customer service and 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. Poor customer service/support will cost you a lot. Include a chatbox on your site, offer 24/7 support if possible, have a blog that explains Frequently asked questions/ issues about your brand and how to resolve them.
  5. Website and App design: Make your App and website easy to navigate. Clunky designs can hurt your SEO efforts; poor graphics can affect your app. Colors have a psychological effect on your visitors, so be sure to understand this and make use of color(s) that truly represent your brand.
  6. Invest in analytical software programs: Invest in software like Opentracker, survey monkey and hotjar. Track your Engagement – having an overview of the actions taken by users over time will help you improve your business continually.
  7. Learn to make your customers feel loved: Give discount codes if you can, say thank you when they purchase something, ask for opinions. Customers who already have a relationship with your brand, want to be heard and seen. It builds trust and loyalty.

In conclusion,

You don’t need to guess anymore.

You can see what your customers are dissatisfied with. You can take steps to address them.

Improve your ROI and make more profit by providing value to your customers. Understanding and satisfying your customer base is key.

Tracking user engagement is the way for you to do this.

Author : Vera Agiang

Vera Agiang is an Experienced Marketing Specialist with a demonstrated history of working with B2B FinTech and Saas companies. Follow her on LinkedIn.

How to Incorporate Social Media into Your Buyer Journey

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How to Incorporate Social Media into Your Buyer Journey

What was once a place to connect with friends has become an integral part of any marketing toolkit. In 2023, spending on social media advertising is expected to reach $268.7 billion, and with good reason. From building brand awareness to fostering engagement, social media has proven to be a powerful part of the customer journey.

But social media is about more than just scheduling content and increasing your brand’s visibility. It’s about understanding your customer and their unique journey. By taking the time to anticipate their needs, you can position your product or service as the natural solution to their problems. 

Here’s how you can utilize the opportunities social media offers in each stage of the buyer journey and integrate social media conversion tracking into your ecommerce dashboard.

social media in buyer journey

Incorporating Social Media into Each Stage of the Buyer Journey

Awareness Stage 

Social media is proven to be a vital tool in driving brand awareness. By creating relevant and engaging content, your brand can capture the attention of potential customers while amplifying the reach of your other marketing efforts (such as public relations or content marketing). The goal here is to choose platforms where your audience is most likely to be found and then create awareness campaigns tailored to those platforms. Social listening on Facebook groups, for example, will give you insight into what topics your audience is most interested in and allows you to create content that resonates with them in a powerful way. Giveaways and competitions are also effective ways to get people engaging with your brand and build a following.

Consideration Stage 

By sharing product demos, customer testimonials, and reviews on your social media channels, you can provide potential customers in the consideration stage with the information they need to make an informed decision. In addition, you can utilize social media to answer any queries or concerns potential customers may have. Q&A live sessions, for example, are an excellent way to engage with your audience and provide real-time support. Unboxing videos and product reviews can also be highly effective in providing customers with the confidence and motivation they need to make a purchase. If you offer a guarantee, now is the time to promote it. But, always ensure that your promotional posts have an authentic and customer-centric tone. A direct-to-camera video, for example, can be a great way to make a personal connection with your audience and put a human face to your brand.

Conversion Stage / Decision Making

The power of social media lies in its ability to reach a massive audience, and businesses can leverage this to offer exclusive deals to their followers. By promoting offers, discounts, and other incentives on their social media channels, businesses can create a sense of urgency and drive customers to convert. Posting thought-leadership content and authority-building content at this stage in the journey is essential to position your business as a trustworthy leader in the market. Strong calls to action in captions and interactive videos where buyers can purchase directly through your video are great ways to leverage the power of social media to drive sales and increase conversions.

Retention Stage 

The sense of community that social media provides is invaluable in retaining customers. By fostering a two-way dialogue on social media, businesses can create meaningful relationships with their customers, boosting retention rates. This means posting consistently on whichever platforms you have chosen as your best fit, engaging with customers directly, and responding swiftly to their queries. Offering repeat buyer discounts or loyalty programs can also be a great way to encourage customers to come back and purchase with you again. Additionally, by tracking customer journeys on social media, businesses can better understand their purchasing habits and tailor relevant content to each individual. This ensures that customers feel appreciated, valued, and understood — critical factors in the customer experience.

Advocacy Stage

When businesses share user-generated content, such as customer reviews and testimonials, they can showcase their happy customers and create a ripple effect of positive sentiment. Ultimately, this can lead to increased customer loyalty and higher conversion rates. User-generated content is far more impactful than any other type of content as it is authentic, unbiased, and highly trusted by potential customers. One way to encourage user-generated content is to run competitions and reward customers who share your content on their own social media channels. Using a branded hashtag and motivating customers to mention your hashtag in posts is a great way to increase awareness of your brand and can be incredibly effective in increasing consumer engagement. Partnering with influencers and micro-influencers is also an excellent way to leverage social media for advocacy and generate positive sentiment around your brand. Well-chosen influencers can help to spread the word about your products and services, further exposing your brand to potential customers. 

Pro Tip:

By posting one of these above-mentioned content pieces daily, you’ll have enough content to post five times a week. This way, you can consistently and effectively reach the full spectrum of your buyers at different stages of their journey.

Measure the Impact of Social Media on Your Buyer Journey

Many social media platforms have built-in analytics tools that allow you to track your impressions and engagement. But what if you want more robust tools that integrate with your e-commerce site to track your conversion rate?

For many businesses, the challenge lies in translating advertising budgets into meaningful conversions. While brand engagement, sentiment, and reach are critical, they should be seen as a bridge from your social campaigns to your website. 

At Opentracker, we provide the essential tools you need to identify which marketing channels are driving the most traffic, along with key metrics such as page views, cart additions, and conversions that provide valuable insights into how customers interact with your site. This, in turn, allows you to improve everything from your checkout process to your user interface to streamline the customer experience.

Tap into the full potential of social media marketing with goal-oriented customer journey tracking! Click to book a discovery call today!

The Role of Mobile in the Modern-Day Customer Journey

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The Role of Mobile in the Modern-Day Customer Journey

It’s no secret that the rise of smartphones has transformed how people interact with brands. Whether it’s the latest in fashionable footwear, browsing product reviews, scouring real estate listings, or making dinner reservations, you’d be hard-pressed to find an industry that hasn’t overhauled its customer journey in response to the breakneck pace of our mobile-first world.

mobile customer journey

[Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash]

The convenience of mobile devices has revolutionized how customers research, compare, and ultimately, purchase products and services. With the rise of mobile apps, social media, and mobile-responsive websites, businesses can gain meaningful insights into their audience while delivering a personalized customer experience that fosters engagement, connection, and conversions. 

By harnessing the power of a mobile-centric customer journey, ambitious businesses can enhance their overall marketing and sales strategies—here’s how.

Awareness: Mobile Boosts Business Discoverability

As a result of the rise of mobile search, new businesses are being discovered at faster rates than ever. In addition to search engines like Google, potential customers are leveraging various platforms to uncover products and services in their area.

This includes platforms that were not initially created for search, such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Today, some customers discover new products solely through these apps, foregoing traditional search engines altogether.

With so many avenues for customers to meet your brand, businesses that fail to embrace mobile risk being overshadowed by competitors. Today, a comprehensive marketing strategy not only requires ensuring high visibility on Google, but also means having a strong presence on social media and listing directories, tracking your customers on multiple platforms, and effectively following up on leads.

Conversions: Mobile Revolutionizes How Customers Buy

A decade ago, customers would take the time to search for a solution to their needs, seek out credible reviews, compare prices on various e-commerce sites, and check out a business’s website. Today, that process happens lightning fast—in a few minutes, and often without leaving their search platform.

In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, optimizing the mobile customer journey is essential for any business that wants to remain competitive. If your customers are finding you on search or social media platforms, implementing native tools (such as Google Shopping or Instagram Shopping) provides a frictionless shopping experience that makes it easy for them to navigate to their cart and complete their purchase. 

Of course, identifying where and how your customers are shopping is key to improving your customer journey. Whether your customers are shopping on Amazon, eBay, Google, or other e-commerce platforms, we keep track of your customer data from multiple sources in one place to give you a complete overview of your performance on each channel.

Retention: The Mobile Experience Brings Customers Back

The mobile-first customer journey doesn’t end with a purchase. A great mobile user experience can facilitate long-lasting relationships with loyal customers by providing fast and efficient shipping status updates, streamlined package tracking, and robust after-sales support.

To further enhance the post-purchase customer experience, mobile retargeting is a powerful tool that brings existing customers back into your sales funnel. With Opentracker’s automated customer journey reporting in real-time, you can see exactly where you’re losing customers on your site, then retarget them with online ads or use the data to improve that stage of their journey. 

Whether you’re beginning to implement your mobile customer journey or want to supercharge your existing customer experience, Opentracker is an innovative platform that offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to automate customer journey reporting while equipping you with the insightful analytics and data you need to stay ahead of the competition. 

Are you ready to embrace the power of mobile-first technology? Click to book a discovery call today!

Access Facebook user profile data with FB Login

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Start your free, no-risk, 4 week trial!

Access Facebook user profile data with FB Login

 

Use Facebook user profile data to populate your analytics reports

visitor profile with gender from facebookHave you ever wanted to have in-depth details about your website visitors or app users?

If your users “login with Facebook” and login to your site with their Facebook credentials, you can access valuable profile data.

In this article, we will discuss and explain two topics

a) How to access Facebook visitor data and 
b) How to insert it this data into your Opentracker web analytics reports.

This data is available when a visitor/ user is logged in with Facebook login details.

Q: How does it work?
A: When your visitors login to your site or app with their Facebook identity, you collect user information which you can access via our api. This information can then be shown in the Opentracker reporting system, and populate Visitor Profiles.
Additionally, you can then search through all of your data to match or locate any visitors or variables that interest you.

Furthermore, note that due to the technical nature of this article, knowledge on javascript and Facebook api [1] are required. In this example, we will collect information on the visitor’s gender.

The Javascript used to collect visitor Facebook profile information


function login() {
    FB.login(function(response) {
        if (response.authResponse) {

            // connected
            console.log("FB.login connected");
            window.location.reload();

        } else {

            // cancelled
            console.log("FB.login cancelled");
        }
    },
    fbscope);
}

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
    FB.init({
        appId: '123456789012345',

        // App ID
        channelUrl: '//staging.pdfmyurl.com/facebook.channel.html',

        // Channel File
        status: true,

        // check login status
        cookie: true,

        // enable cookies to allow the server to access the session
        xfbml: true // parse XFBML
    });

    // Additional init code here
    FB.getLoginStatus(function(response) {
        if (response.status === 'connected') {

            // connected
            console.log("FB.getLoginStatus connected");
            sendUserInfo();

        } else if (response.status === 'not_authorized') {

            // not_authorized
            // User logged into FB but not authorized
            console.log("FB.getLoginStatus not_authorized");

        } else {

            // not_logged_in
            // User not logged into FB
            console.log("FB.getLoginStatus not_logged_in");
        }
    });
};

function sendUserInfo() {
    FB.api('/me', function(response) {

        //console.log("my object: %o", response);
        var map = new OTMap();

        //map.put("username!", response.username);
        map.put("gender!", response.gender);

        OTLogService.sendEvent("user logged in", map);
    });
}
The above javascript code snippet is triggered when a user clicks on a login button on your website. When the user has logged in via the pop up window, and successfully authorized, a custom event is sent to opentracker [7]. Note the exclamation mark on the map key. This is the start of the journey to collect user information on your site. To learn more about what user information can be collected, please refer to the facebook api [8] [9] [10]. Here are a few examples from the facebook api [2] [3] [4] [5].

In order to see what data has been collected for your site, login to http://ot3.opentracker.net and navigate to visitor online and visitor clickstream. Below are screenshots illustrating the example from this article, implemented in the Opentracker reporting system. Please note that the gender has appeared in the visitor profile.

clickstream with gender and login status

The illustration above shows us Opentracker visitor engagement reporting with clickstream enhanced visitor profile including a visitor gender.
full clickstream detail with gender and login status from facebook

The illustration above gives us two pieces of information: the gender and the login status (login event), derived using a “login with facebook” event.

Full screen Facebook user-data in Opentracker clickstream

References

[1]  https://developers.facebook.com/apps/

[2]  https://web.archive.org/web/20200203213418/http://www.fbrell.com/auth/account-info

[3]  https://web.archive.org/web/20200129213616/http://www.fbrell.com/fb.api/does-like

[4]  https://web.archive.org/web/20171226151555/http://www.fbrell.com/fb.api/everyone-data

[5]  https://web.archive.org/web/20161106191718/http://www.fbrell.com/fb.api/friends

[6]  http://pdfmyurl.com/js/facebook.js

[7]  http://api.opentracker.net/api/inserts/browser/javascript_implementation.jsp

[8]  https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.api/

[9]  https://fbdevwiki.com/wiki/FB.api

[10]  https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/

Blog & Articles

Blog & Articles.

We publish an ongoing series of blogs & articles on various topics related to digital analytics and online marketing.

What Web Metrics Can Do For You

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What (exactly) web metrics can do for you. Fail to plan : plan to fail

Business is based on margins and profits.

In order to generate a specific profit X, there is a minimum amount of sales Y that need to take place.

Business forecast and managing a business rely on calculations. Whether or not costs are covered and sufficient revenue is generated should not be left to chance. Website and customer journey analytics are necessary to determine what is working, what is not working and how to ensure business health. Click to read about driving performance with customer journey.

In a nutshell: business and website managers need to stay on top of actual performance and make ongoing changes. 

Example

This is where statistics come in. For a web-based business the success of the business depends on a combination of several metrics:

  1. The amount of traffic that comes in
  2. The amount of traffic that converts
  3. The average, or total, value of the conversions
  4. Additional consideration is whether or not the revenue is recurring

The take-home is that these metrics need to be reverse-engineered to ensure that the business stays healthy and grows. Projections can be made based on historical data. Current data is then used to calculate revenue projections. Action can be taken if the numbers are not high enough.

Conversion rates tend to stabilise and do not change again, unless something else change – click to read how this works. In other words, if you receive on average 20-30 visitors per day, this will remain more-or-less constant.

Unless you increase or decrease the budget or change your marketing content you will receive a constant amount of visitors.

In a great many cases, the amount of traffic that converts (conversion rate) is also consistent or stable.

The point is that you can use metrics to:

  1. Reverse engineer (predict) how much revenue will be generated based on current and historical traffic.
  2.  Perhaps more importantly – know when the numbers are too low, when your efforts are not succeeding; and when you need to add or change traffic sources and marketing strategies.
  3. Businesses rely on predictability. Metrics measure what is actually happening and are used to calculate:
    • Predictions
    • Signals that additional actions to generate revenue need to be taken
    • Validation of continued attempts to generate both traffic and ensure that the traffic is converting. Especially as there are multiple sources of traffic, which needs to be measured per channel (see below).

The last point in this train of thought is that there are multiple channels (traffic sources) through which your customers journey:

  • New traffic
  • Existing (returning) traffic
  • Nurturing (newsletters)
  • Direct cold outreach emails
  • Blog posts and articles
  • White papers and downloads,
  • SEO campaigns with different vendors; Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. 

The take-home is that (conversion) metrics and customer journey analysis tells you which of these channels are working and which data is essential to creating and managing success.

Power of Customer Analytics

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Power of Customer Analytics

Today’s businesses are swimming in data. But, as any swimmer knows, it’s not enough to just be surrounded by water – you have to know how to use it to your advantage. That’s where customer analytics come in. Customer analytics is the process of using data to generate insights that can improve your business, increase revenue, and drive customer retention. 


There are four main types of customer analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. In this blog article, we’ll take a closer look at each one, and explore how you can use customer analytics to improve your business.


Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics answer the question “What happened?”


They provide a snapshot of what has already transpired, such as how many customers made a purchase last month, what was the average order value, or how long it took for a customer to make a purchase. Descriptive analytics are important because they provide a foundation for understanding the way your customers behave. This type of data can be used to identify trends and patterns, which can be helpful in forecasting future behavior. To generate insights from descriptive analytics, businesses need to have access to data that is organized and structured in a way that makes it easy to slice and dice. This data can come from a variety of sources, such as customer surveys, website analytics, transaction records, and social media data. However, descriptive analytics cannot tell you why something happened, which is where diagnostic and predictive analytics become valuable.


Diagnostic Analytics

Diagnostic analytics answer the question “Why did it happen?”


They help you identify the root cause of an issue, such as why customers are leaving your site without making a purchase, or why orders are being delayed. Diagnostic analytics use data mining techniques to uncover relationships and identify causal factors. This type of analysis can be used to improve processes, optimize performances, and resolve problems. Diagnostic analytics can be obtained through surveys, customer interviews, focus groups, and other qualitative methods where customers can provide feedback about their experience. Alternatively, services like Opentracker can provide website data that can be used to diagnose problems so you can improve the customer experience and mitigate issues before they cause long-term damage.


Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics answer the question “What could happen?”



Based off of historical data, predictive analytics uses statistical modeling to generate insights about future trends and behavior. This type of analysis can be used to identify opportunities and risks, make decisions about resource allocation, and develop marketing campaigns. For example, predictive analytics can be used to determine which customers are likely to churn so you can take steps to retain them, or to identify which products are likely to be popular so you can stock more of them. To generate predictive insights, businesses need data that is clean, accurate, and complete. Having a team of experts onboard who are skilled in statistical modeling is also critical for this type of analysis. In-house data scientists can be costly, which is why access to our team of professionals is included in an Opentracker subscription so we can assist you in generating predictive insights and interpreting the results as your business grows.


Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics answer the question “What should we do?” 


It’s not enough to know what happened in the past or what could happen in the future. To make data-driven decisions, you need to know what actions you should take to achieve your desired outcome. This is where prescriptive analytics comes in. Prescriptive analytics uses optimization algorithms to identify the best course of action, given a set of constraints and objectives. This type of analysis takes into account a variety of factors, such as costs, risks, and benefits, to help businesses make decisions that are in their best interest. With the right data in your hands, you can start to develop prescriptive analytics solutions that will allow you to automate decision-making and improve your overall efficiency.

No matter what type of business you have, customer analytics can be a powerful tool for driving growth and success. By understanding the different types of customer analytics and how you can use them, you can make better decisions, improve your operations, and move your business forward.

 

Opentracker offers a suite of tools and services that are designed to be user-friendly and scalable so businesses of all sizes can benefit from data-driven decision-making. We help you automate your customer journey reporting, uncover actionable insights, and make better decisions that drive real results. With direct access to our data analytics team, a dedicated customer success agent, and a dedicated database engineer, you can be sure that you’re getting accurate, actionable data you need to grow your business. 


Book a discovery call today to learn more about how Opentracker can help you turn data into insightful, actionable customer intelligence. 

Improving Customer Experience

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How does deeply understanding your customer’s journey unlock revenue?

You’re in the business of satisfying your customer with a great experience. But how do you know if you’re delivering?
 
customer experience

Businesses are spending more on promotions than ever before, but most struggle to know what actions to take and where to focus their efforts.

When customers don’t buy, do you know why? Can you improve the buying experience? The marketing? Differentiate the product? Without an idea of what your customers are feeling or how they are engaging, it’s hard to make informed decisions.

Privacy laws are making it clear that it is important to collect your own data related to your own customers. Trusting third parties like Facebook or Google to give you these insights is now a significant risk. More and more businesses are choosing first party solutions.

Getting sales is great, but how many sales are you losing because you are not seeing bottlenecks in the customer journey? Knowing what delights and discourages your customers is next to impossible without controlling your own data.

Customers have 5 touchpoints, sometimes spanning days or weeks, before making a purchase and you following up. Are you measuring these touchpoints to increase conversions?

Moving The Needle And Driving Revenue

Not tracking your customer’s journey is like tossing money out the front door.
For any business, tracking the customer journey is essential. As Peter Drucker said “If you don’t measure it, you will not improve it”. All too often, you’re forced to guess how your customers will buy. You don’t know what’s working and what’s not. Consequently, you have no idea what to optimize. You’re wasting money.

You should guide customers through their journey. Provide support when they get stuck. Learn what makes them leave and why you can’t close the deal. Don’t rely on just Google’s or Meta’s report.

Track The Customer Journey. Own Your E-Commerce Dashboard.

Customer Journey by Opentracker makes it easy to control the customer’s journey. We help you get a clear picture of how you can improve what you’re doing – and where you need to make adjustments. The result? You get more sales.

Our platform helps track customer behavior and delivers essential insights. Whether it’s tracking new leads and acquisition or understanding retention and the factors that drive repeat purchases. Customer Journey provides clarity and actionable insights that boosts your ROI.

With Customer Journey, you will get the data insights you need faster, more reliably, and at a fraction of the cost. Our team is dedicated and knows how to work with e-commerce businesses. Our consultants will be there to make sense of your metrics so that you can make data-driven decisions.

Delight your customer. Happy customers pay more, more often.

Learn how Customer Journey by Opentracker can help boost your sales!

Click to book a discovery call today:

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