Improving Retention by Segmenting an Audience.Once your business reaches a certain level of growth, the portrait of your “perfect customer” becomes blurred. Now, you need to learn not only how to attract new clients but to keep those who are already connected to your brand. To do so, you need to find a way to sort your audience to keep in touch with each branch. One of the ways to do so is cohort analysis.
It is the type of marketing research that provides insight into customer’s behavior via analyzing their actions on your online platforms. Most customers can be divided into different groups by categorizing their behavioral patterns in a specific frame. Thus, by framing, you create a so-called “cohort” of customers – a group that acts in the relatively same way and can be influenced by your marketing strategies and ad campaigns. Creating a cohort-specific ad is obviously more effective than trying to approach your whole clientele.
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The ways cohort analysis is beneficial to your business
- For one, you can find out who are your top clients are! How they think, how they act, which products, apps, or services they require? Unite your most loyal audience under a single cohort and double down on your efforts to reach them and present the top services you have available.
- Gain insight into your performance. What is the most popular step users take while using your site or app that leads them to complete a purchase? And what causes them to leave? Optimize your services for each cohort individually and observe the improved results.
- Observe the cycle your clients go through and learn how to extend it! They come, make the purchase, another one, and leave. How to convince your clients to stay? Maybe there was a sudden change in a point of time, like a new design or product, that caused them to leave? Track your customers’ behavior in real-time to come up with a fresh solution.
- Create cohorts based on any parameter, even blind. Introduce changes to one group and keep everything the same for the other one and compare the effect. That’s the way for you to learn how your decisions impact the overall brand performance.
Five steps your research should go through
- Get the information. Collect the client’s data from your CRM, Analytics sheet, or other sources and gather it all in one place for categorization.
- Select the single value you need to analyze – the date of registration or a specific action the users performed, etc. This value will define a cohort.
- Select the parameter that you will observe in correlation with the cohort’s behavior, like KPI.
- Create a table that’ll summarize the previous three steps and demonstrate the cause and effect of the client’s actions during a specific time frame.
- Visualize your table in graphs or diagrams.
For step 2, the values you select should be either based on a date (so you analyze the cohort of customers who signed up or purchased something on a specific day, week, or month) or on an action, they took or didn’t take (like launching a store in your mobile game or purchasing a particular ware.) This way can make your research more accurate and specific.
You can skip the first three steps by using services like Google Analytics, which will present you with a table of its own. But the downsides to it are significant – the data it has is only partial. So, you can’t get a full picture and come to clear conclusions. There’s an alternative way – with a platform like OWOX BI, you can connect all the data you have in one place and analyze it simultaneously.
Why should you research cohorts of customers?
Researching into your customers’ behavior is always useful, and there are numerous examples to prove its effectiveness. For one, you can find the perfect balance between the notifications you send on an email or mobile – how are your clients react when they receive more or less? It is important to remind them of your brand, but not wearing them out is equally essential.
On a larger scale, it can be the ideal tool to test the waters before introducing significant changes to your service, how introducing new features influences your whole audience and different segments in it, and who are more likely to use innovation you implement!
Summary
It is just one method in the whole range of techniques to segment your audience. Yet, it is one of the most effective as it depends on raw behavioral data to understand what your loyal customers want, what new clients need, and what potential buyers are attracted to. By getting insight into different groups of your target audience, you can make their experience more pleasant and raise their loyalty to your brand without much effort. The only thing you’ll be required to do is find an individual approach that will nevertheless work on a whole branch of clients.
