Unlocking Customer Influence: 3 Steps to Utilizing Your Behavioral Data

One of Dale Carnegie’s best pieces of advice to win influence is to become genuinely interested in others. For customers already using Amplitude’s platform, you will be well acquainted with the ease with which you can dig into your customer’s in-product behavior. You know how to turn these clear insights into actions to improve your product, push specific user pathways, and ultimately yield greater retention. But did you consider that this existing behavioral data is also a valuable asset in its own right?

Here in Europe, third-party data is becoming increasingly difficult to access. Regulations such as GDPR and its related rulings in France, Germany, Norway, and Austria outlawing the transfer of data. Therefore, optimizing the vast amount of information you already have is increasingly essential. Leading marketers are 58% more likely than mainstream marketers to agree that first-party data is a strategic asset strongly.

Utilizing your data is not just critical for your immediate product team; growth and marketing need it too. And it’s here that your data has new and exciting potential. With Burger King UK as an example, we will discuss the three steps to delivering the right messaging at the right time to the right people. Put Dale Carnegie aside and let your data grant you the influence you sought instead.

Step 1: Segment your audience

Segmentation is vital for businesses to understand their customers better and create personalized experiences catering to their needs and preferences. However, traditional methods of segmentation based solely on demographics may not provide a comprehensive understanding of customer motivations and needs. A more insightful approach is to group customers based on their behavior, which requires dealing with large and complex behavioral data.

Creating behavioral cohorts is a key way to understand better audience segments and how they impact downstream metrics like engagement and churn. Behavioral cohorts are dynamic groups constantly evolving as users move in and out of them based on their behavior and preferences. This approach enables businesses to keep up with changing customer needs and behaviors and make data-driven decisions that drive growth and improve customer retention.

The process of creating these cohorts can be time-consuming and challenging, but audience management solutions like Audiences provide a self-serve solution that leverages machine learning to help organizations segment users quickly. Creating audience segments through an analyst team typically involves filing a ticket. Self-service tools with reliable data sources can reduce this process significantly. Using granular first-party data allows businesses to easily create valuable segments without an analyst, saving time and resources.

Step 2: Activate

Segmenting your customers using Amplitude is just the beginning of an effective customer engagement strategy. Once you have created customer cohorts, it’s important to activate them across your tech stack. With Amplitude’s syncing capabilities, you can stop manually recreating audience lists in downstream tools that may vary from your official cohort and are challenging to maintain. You can send the same cohorts to other parts of your stack, standardize definitions and composition, and choose the best update frequency. This will keep your cohorts synced across your stack, ensuring you can effectively target and engage with your customers. Amplitude makes it easy to activate your customer cohorts by sending them to 35+ third-party integrations. You can engage with your customers across channels with Braze, MoEngage, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and more. You can use pre-built integrations or build your own by leveraging Amplitude’s developer resources. Syncing and activating your customer cohorts can boost engagement, drive growth, and create a seamless customer experience across your tech stack.

Step 3: Optimize

In the world of marketing automation, superficial metrics like open rates and click-through rates can only tell part of the story. Modern marketers require a deeper understanding of audience segments and how they impact downstream metrics such as engagement and churn. To achieve this, you can use a closed-loop approach. This involves running campaigns, then feeding that data to analytics tools like Amplitude to analyze the business impact. By having product and user data live together with campaign data, you can analyze and truly measure the business impact of campaigns, giving marketers the information they need to optimize their campaigns and repeat the loop.. With this approach, marketers can better understand their customers and achieve tangible business outcomes.

Case study: Burger King UK

Burger King UK embarked on a new analytics journey to show ROI on marketing efforts through their digital products. Having started from scratch, they teamed up with their global partner, RBI, who were already early adopters of Amplitude. BK UK already knew that the app offered value for money, which aligned with business objectives at the time, but beyond that, they had a one-size-fits-all marketing approach. Initial insights proved that the product offered the value for money customers were seeking, information on store locations, and menu options.

An early use case with Amplitude opened up a new segment for BK UK. They were able to identify a previously untapped segment of customers who were interested in vegan menu options. It also proved a very important case in demonstrating to the business that an investment in analytics had great ROI for marketing.

Through behavioral tracking, they were able to identify a new group of people who were indicating an interest in plant-based/vegan products via the app. By sending this cohort to Braze, they could send more personalized content to meet these groups’ interest in vegan options. They found that this group, who had previously been looking in the app, was now going to restaurants and making orders. It was powerful to show these insights to action back to the business through data, as it made this new group and their wants visible.

Getting started

Utilizing customer data through segmentation, activation, and optimization can significantly improve customer engagement, growth, and retention. Burger King UK’s example shows how identifying new segments can lead to product innovation and increased customer satisfaction. With regulations making third-party data increasingly difficult to access, leveraging existing behavioral data is becoming more critical than ever for businesses. By using Audiences, businesses can better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, create personalized experiences, and target specific user groups with customized content.

Want to see Amplitude Audiences in action? Request a demo.