It’s no secret that we’re living in a world that is overflowing with DATA. According to a study conducted in 2015, 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Over 63,000 search queries are performed per second on Google alone. In just 5 years the number of smart connected devices in the world will be more than 50 billion – all of which will create data that can be shared, collected and analyzed.

As a business owner, the question is no longer “Should I invest in data analysis”, but “How can I use this wealth of information to my advantage.” From a pure cost perspective, you’re likely investing in data storage for compliance purposes – it’s time to put that data to work!

Using data to search for deeper insights into your customers’ purchase journey, psyche, and experience can inform your business decisions and help your company become more customer-focused. This helps you win in your competitive space by identifying new opportunities that enable your company to grow. Ultimately, business data-driven companies are better prepared to compete and respond to market change because they’ve built a foundation of agility based on data.

Organize Existing Data To Improve Customer Experience

Analyze your current data and determine how it may be useful for your customers. One company that has provided a great example of this is Delta Air Lines. They check millions of bags for travelers every year and it’s a point of stress for many of their customers. Through their internal tracking system, which they had invested millions of dollars into, Delta employees were able to keep tabs on luggage as it made its way to a final destination.

By taking a fresh look at their data, they realized that they could organize the tracking data that they had available and provide that information to customers to ease their minds as they travelled. As one Delta spokesman, Paul Skrbec, noted, “We’ve had all this tracking data available, but one of the things we realized about two years ago is that customers would benefit from having that information.”

Thus, Delta developed a mobile app that tracks luggage and has since been downloaded more than 11 million times.

Think what data do you collect and use internally that may be beneficial for your customers?

Leverage Data To Increase Marketing Efficiency

One of the most effective ways to utilize data is to improve your marketing efforts. The more you know about your customers, the more you can create campaigns that will provide a return on your marketing spend. Narellan Pools, an Australian-based swimming pool company, experienced this first-hand. After several years in business, they experienced a decline in revenue of about 25% from 2007 to 2013. Determined to understand the reason for the slowing demand, Narellan and their marketing partner, Affinity, turned to the data.

Searching for customer insights, they compiled seven terabytes of data – both internally and externally sourced- to reach a key customer insight. When the current temperature, in a given locale, was higher than the mean rolling monthly average for two days or more, customer leads converted to sales at up to 800% of the norm.

Armed with this information, they launched a digital campaign that engaged only when those criteria were met. This campaign increased sales by 23% in the first year and generated a ration of revenue to expenses of 54:1.

Share Data To Empower Partners

Anyone in the retail space knows how crucial presentation and shelf management is to sales. For years, distributors relied on manual measurements in-store or phone conversations to understand how their products were displayed in their retail outlets.

Coca-Cola Amatil is one of the largest bottlers of Coca-Cola products in the Asia Pacific region and they were looking for ways to address retail issues in real-time. So, they sourced image-based technology to empower their sales reps to identify performance gaps and apply corrective actions in store.

Basically, reps were able to take pictures of the store shelves, send them off to be analyzed, and receive actionable reports within minutes.

Not only did the sales reps benefit, management received the data and were able to use it to develop retail strategies and communicate more effectively with store managers. Within 5 months of implementing this data-driven strategy, Coca-Cola Amatil gained 1.3% market share in the region.

As these examples suggest, putting your business data to use is an increasingly important aspect of business growth. Not sure where to start? The experts at Softsys Hosting will help you develop a strategy for collecting and storing the crucial data that will drive your decisions.