Data analytics help Indian brands gain enhanced market traction

Customer and market analytics are becoming extremely important for companies across the globe and Indian brands are now aggressively trying to capture their customers' data and analyse it for providing better service and to target the customers more efficiently. It has been found that India is currently witnessing a trend of ‘parallelism’ in consumer behaviour, as customers today display multiple behavioural patterns depending on the time, space and platform they interact with a brand. The attention span and turnaround time are also shorter than ever before. Thereby, it has become very important for companies or brands to have a holistic outlook of the customer – encompassing insights on customer demographics, digital activity, transactional data, key customer attributes, and behavioural data. Interestingly, the Indian marketing analytics industry’s present annual revenue is pegged to be around $2.03 billion and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.8 per cent till 2020.
 
Mumbai headquartered firm, Netcore Solutions, is working to provide an integrated solution that combines customer analytics, cross-channel marketing automation and marketing analytics. “While companies in India have shown a keen interest in adopting marketing analytics to make informed, data-driven decisions and effectively reach out to the target customers, the concept is still at a nascent stage,” said Veer Chand Bothra, chief innovation officer at Netcore Solutions.

Sirisha Tadepalli, vice president, brand marketing at Zivame.com, an online lingerie store, agrees that people are exhibiting multiple personalities at different times and traditional demographics have become irrelevant in today's age. “Lingerie is not an impulsive buying unlike the outer fashion category which is more of an impulse driven purchase. For instance, in Tier II and Tier III cities of India a lot of women have a collective account and then discuss within themselves before buying any lingerie. Through such discussions they get to know which item has the highest sales or which item is popular. It is essential for brands to know about such customer behaviour and data associated with it that can be analysed. Such data can help us target our customers better,” said Tadepalli.

Navneeth Shanmugam, head of BI and Analytics at Arvind Internet (An Arvind Limited Company), feels that customer analytics can play an important role in better analysing their customer behaviour. “For instance, analytics can help us track how many customers actually came back to our stores to purchase what kind of clothes. There are a few customers who do not come back to the store for more than one year as they may require only a suit, which may be a one time requirement for an occasion. Data analytics can play a major role in bringing and attracting our offline customers to the online mode and different data points related to customer behaviour can help us immensely in this,” said Shanmugam.
 
Apparently, Netcore Solutions has come up with a solution to empower marketers and analysts with the insights they need to make every customer interaction smarter. The company's marketing data integration services is also aimed at bringing relevant customer data and build summary data attributes to deliver a clever customer data mart which is necessary for a seamless and effective data driven marketing campaign.

“Using analytics and customer data, marketers will be able to identify most profitable customers, most frequent customers, most responding customers as well as preferred products, channel of communication and much more. Different attributes attached to each engagement will allow marketers to closely analyse customer behaviour across every point of interaction. Consequently, this will have an impact on the cost of acquiring customers, improve retention rates and reduce customer churn,” added Bothra.

As per a Business to Customer (B2C) Marketing Automation Report India, 2017 launched by Research NXT and Netcore Solutions, 29 per cent of marketers believed that it is important to have the right marketing mix in order to gain better Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). As per the report in addition, 28 per cent of marketers were considering the use of analytics, while 18 per cent had already included analytics at the core of their marketing strategy. The report also emphasized that analytics is going to play an important role in automating and improving customer engagement. This, in turn, is going to help the marketers get a better conversion rate optimization by enabling brands to engage in a personalized manner with their customers, leading to an increased CLV.