There’s seemingly no end to the amount of customer behavior data you can access with modern analytics tools. The key to turning these data points into valuable insights for your business is making them actionable.
The challenge is determining what information to focus on as you aim to make data-driven decisions. By cultivating a deep understanding of customer needs, you can gain the competitive advantage necessary to break through in crowded markets.
Learn how to make customer insights actionable, where to look for them, and how other ecommerce businesses use them to meet their goals.
What are actionable customer insights?
Actionable customer insights are specific findings from customer data that clearly and directly inform business decisions. Unlike raw data that simply tells you what happened, actionable insights tell you why it happened and what to do about it.
For example, your website analytics may show that shopping cart abandonment happens with 60% of customers at the checkout page. That’s raw data. To reduce the abandoned cart rate, you need to figure out why customers don’t complete their purchase. To do so, you could develop customer surveys that ask for feedback about the user experience (UX) for your website. Perhaps that reveals your customers leave because shipping costs aren’t included until final checkout. This additional charge at the end is an unwelcome surprise.
There’s a clear answer here because the insight from the survey answer meets the criteria to make it actionable:
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It’s specific. People are surprised by the shipping cost.
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It’s tied to a measurable metric. You want to reduce the cart abandonment rate.
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There’s a clear action. Make shipping costs clear earlier in the purchasing process.
Tips to find the right data sources
- Set measurable goals
- Collect quantitative and qualitative data
- Turn to social media
- Use analytics tools
- Do a live observation
- Talk to customers
Businesses have access to multiple data sources that can yield a wide array of insights. To make more informed decisions about the best data sources for your business, try the following:
Set measurable goals
Before collecting any data, it’s helpful to know what you want to get out of it. This helps you determine what to look for and where. A broad goal like boosting sales is vague. This can send your search in too many directions.
Instead, look at the smaller metrics like conversion rates rather than total sales. This can help you set a specific, attainable goal, such as increasing conversions from your product page by 2%.
Here are a few other examples of specific, measurable goals:
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Improve your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) by 10 points.
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Aim to sell $5,000 worth of top-selling products each week.
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Increase interactions, such as likes and comments, on Instagram by 1,000 within 30 days.
Collect quantitative and qualitative data
Actionable customer insights come from a mix of quantitative data and qualitative data:
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Quantitative data. This is where you get objective, raw numbers that can help reveal the source of an issue. For example, website analytics may show that your product page has a high bounce rate, meaning visitors leave immediately after landing on the page. This identifies your problem.
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Qualitative data. This data captures customer sentiment about your brand or product, which can give you deeper insights about why something isn’t working. For example, you might ask for qualitative customer feedback about your product page. The survey results reveal the reason for the high bounce rate: Customers feel the product description is confusing and poorly written.
Turn to social media
Social media is an excellent source for both hard numbers and gathering insights on your audience. You can look at social media metrics like views, watch time, accounts reached, and visitor interactions to improve content, like adopting new formats for existing website themes. Social media monitoring also helps you dig deeper into customer sentiment by tracking conversations that reveal how your audience feels about your brand, your industry, and other content similar to yours.
For Joanna Griffiths, founder of women’s intimate wear company Knix, social media is a go-to for informing her business decisions. “One of my favorite things to say is that the answers are in the comments,” she says on Shopify Masters. By listening closely to what her customers were saying, she found that they were less interested in well-known influencers and wanted more inspiring stories about women in business.
“Female founders have such incredible stories to tell and share, which kind of came from picking up on that from our community,” Joanna says. She then turned this insight into a successful campaign featuring women like Babba Rivera, founder of hair-care brand Ceremonia.
Use analytics tools
Platforms like Shopify Analytics or Tableau can collect data and aid in analyzing it to identify patterns that help shape your decisions. You can get insights on who your customers are, what they love to buy, and different customer segments. These insights help you focus on how to best serve your customers.
For Katherine Oyer, founder of infant clothing company Francis Henri, Shopify helps her better understand which products keep her customers coming back. “I am always pulling reports in Shopify and love to see where we’ve been and where we’re going,” she explains on Shopify Masters. “We look for top sellers of items people really love.”
She turned that insight from sales data into a “baby essentials” category, driving customer loyalty. “I have always believed that if you have a wonderful customer experience and a superior product, people come back,” Katherine explains.
Do a live observation
Focus groups and direct observations can offer insights into how people use your product, inspire new ideas, and reveal unmet needs. This method can also uncover quality shortcomings, user behavior, and pain points that you can use to improve the product.
For skin care brand Shopify Masters. “We were like, OK, after every single person applies this to their hand, they’re smelling their hand instantly. So, clearly, scent is a really important thing.” Seeing this, Three Ships quickly pivoted, changing formulas to meet customer needs.
The result was developing products with neutral or no scent for broader appeal, avoiding polarizing fragrances like lavender or coconut.
Talk to customers
Whether through live interviews or online surveys, asking customers questions like, “How happy are you with your purchase?” can help you find friction points in the customer journey.
In Aerflo’s case, hearing what customers had to say directly influenced product design. Before launching their device to make sparkling water on the go, founders John Thorp and Buzz Wiggins interviewed hundreds of sparkling water consumers to uncover unmet needs. From the interviews, they hit upon two key insights: People felt guilty about single-use plastics and didn’t like subscriptions that force customers to accept more product than they needed.
These insights inspired design revisions for their product and how they’re sold. The founders put in “a lot of development work in building a very specialized way that we call the capsule exchange that works without a subscription,” John explains on Shopify Masters. “You just drop your empties in the mail, and your next order gets shipped out to you right away.”
As a result, they developed a product that could disrupt the sparkling water market and a production process that could scale. These key factors helped them raise more than $10 million to launch the company.
Actionable customer insights FAQ
What are examples of actionable insights?
Some examples of actionable customer insights include switching to a carrier that delivers orders faster after finding that customers are frustrated with long shipping times. Another example: disclosing shipping costs clearly and early in the purchasing process instead of at final checkout, in order to reduce cart abandonment rates.
What is meant by actionable insights?
Actionable insights mean you can take a specific and direct action after collecting and analyzing data.
What is the difference between insights and actionable insights?
Insights can come from raw, unstructured data without a clear application. Actionable insights take that data one step further and give you an idea of how to improve the outcome. Software like Shopify Analytics can help you not only analyze the data, but also decide what changes to make.
How do you find actionable insights?
You can find actionable insights in many different ways, including focus groups, interviews, data collection through software platforms like Shopify Analytics, and monitoring social media.
