Conventional ways of maximizing revenue, such as offering new goods or services, increasing sales channels and analyzing your pricing, are all valid methods for growing your business, but they alone are unlikely to get the results you’re looking for. Payment data plays a large part in your online business growth strategy, allowing you to boost sales more effectively.
Examining customer payment data can provide valuable sales and marketing insights, allowing you to make more informed decisions as you realign your business approach.
Relevant Data
There are a number of pertinent data points that your customer payment data provides:
- When a customer last made a purchase
- How many purchases they’ve made in the past
- The value of each transaction
- Payment methods
- Sales channel (e.g., online, via app, in-store, over the phone, etc.)
- Personal information, such as their name, email and loyalty/membership card information
- The locations from which they’ve made purchases
This data is likely integrated into your payment processing software, but you may be able to find additional insights within your customer relationship management (CRM) application as well.
These, along with other pieces of data, can help you build better customer interactions for current customers and also attract new ones.
Customer Patterns
You can also gather useful information about your customers’ behavior from payment data. Having as many data points about a transaction as possible allows you to make more reliable customer journey projections that, in turn, lead to better customer experiences and greater revenue.
By understanding your existing customer’s sales channel preferences, frequency, and average transaction value, you can have a better idea of which areas of your business strategy work best and which ones could use some improvement.
You may discover, for example, that customers who use the app generally only purchase one or two inexpensive items in a single transaction, while those who use a browser spend more on high-ticket purchases. This may be because your app isn’t as full-featured as your website, making it difficult for them to do proper research before making a big purchase. Adding more information about your goods and services into your app could solve this issue, increasing sales within that channel.
Customer Loyalty
Knowing when and how often customers make purchases can also help you develop more effective loyalty programs.
You could, for instance, provide deeper discounts for customers that make purchases more than twice a month. You could also look at their previous purchases and send emails to suggest complementary products or remind them when it’s time to restock.
Location
Where your sales originate can also be an important factor in business growth. For companies that do international business, the card issuer country code can let you know the geographical region from which your customers most frequently make purchases. This can be vital to developing websites in their native language and offering payment options in their currencies. Drilling down even deeper into customer location data can give you the states and cities that provide the most revenue, allowing you to make even more specific services, such as discounts when local sports teams win.
Payment information can also give you a better idea of where and how to expand brick-and-mortar locations. You may find, for instance, that stores in a particular area see the majority of their sales from just a few items, making them better suited for a boutique experience rather than a full-fledged retail location.
Payments data is the central link in improving the growth of your business, providing actionable insights into customer behaviors and sales patterns. Having a full understanding of the plethora of information available to your business can help you optimize your offerings, adapt your services, better suit your customers’ needs and grow your business confidently.
References:
https://due.com/blog/5-ways-use-payment-data-increase-revenue
https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2017/vantiv-nicole-jass-big-data-customer-loyalty-retail
