Decoding the Data: The 10 Best Customer Analytics Tools for Your Business
Decoding the Data: The 10 Best Customer Analytics Tools for Your Business
Are you searching for top-notch customer analytics software to empower your data-driven decisions? Look no further than these exceptional analytics solutions tailored for enterprises.
Being unaware of how your customers engage with your product can lead to misguided business decisions. A remarkable user experience is born out of a deep understanding of your customers. Since both subscription-based software products and real-world services are part of today’s service industry, it is crucial to learn about your customers’ preferences, pain points, and values.
Customer analytics involves analyzing behavioral data to uncover trends, shared experiences, and preferences among your current and potential customers. But what exactly is customer analytics software, and how does it function?
What is customer analytics software? In essence, customer analytics software is a marketing analytics tool designed to analyze data related to your existing and prospective customers. It goes beyond basic demographic statistics, offering insights into customer behavior, thoughts, fears, interests, and desires.
Forbes reported in 2018 that 70% of enterprises were boosting their investments in customer analytics, with 58% experiencing a considerable increase in customer retention and loyalty. Mordor Intelligence projected an impressive 18.2% annual CAGR for the analytics sector between 2021 and 2026. Given the growing interest in customer analytics, it’s essential to invest in this area to stay competitive.
We’ve compiled a list of 10 leading customer analytics solutions, along with their ideal use cases.
Top 10 customer analytics software and tools Check out our top selections for the best customer analytics software in 2023:
- Segment
- Tableau
- Kissmetrics
- Mixpanel
- Plausible
- Salesforce
- Amplitude
- Google Analytics
- Hotjar
- Pendo.io
Segment Ideal for: Precise customer segmentation and persona generation Segment, a Customer Data Platform with over 20,000 clients, tracks customer behavior from initial interactions like opening marketing emails to adding products to shopping carts or accessing subscription services. It can utilize any customer data stored in your CRM, warehouse database, mobile, or web app.
Segment focuses on providing analytics for marketing, product development, or data management. It ensures data accuracy by offering developer-friendly API integrations with systems like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and Adobe Analytics. This guarantees comprehensive, coherent, and comparable data.
Segment ensures data compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations. You can create different customer profiles and target them with customized products and marketing messages.
Pricing Segment offers free trials and demos. Paid subscriptions start at $120 per month for up to 10,000 monthly visitors, with custom enterprise pricing available.
Tableau Ideal for: Data preparation and visual communication Tableau, a widely-used analytics platform with over a million users, offers a suite of business intelligence tools that includes visually appealing dashboards for displaying customer data and a “prep” tool for ensuring clean, complete, and connected data.
Tableau excels in data visualization, allowing users to build custom analytics dashboards that display only the most relevant metrics. The platform also has a mobile version for on-the-go access.
Pricing tiers are based on user roles and deployment options. Prices range from $15 per user per month (Viewer) to $42 (Explorer) or $70 (Creator), with add-ons like the AI-powered forecasting tool, Einstein Discovery.
Kissmetrics Best for: Cohort analysis and optimizing marketing campaigns Kissmetrics is a customer analytics platform designed to help businesses understand customer behavior and optimize marketing campaigns. It specializes in cohort analysis, which groups customers based on shared characteristics, such as when they signed up, the channels through which they arrived, or other common attributes. This enables you to track the performance of specific marketing campaigns and identify trends among different customer groups.
Trusted by companies like Unbounce, SendGrid, and Hootsuite, Kissmetrics offers a range of features that help businesses improve their marketing strategies. It allows you to track and analyze customer behavior in real-time, enabling you to make data-driven decisions quickly. With features like funnel reporting, you can identify bottlenecks in your conversion process and work to resolve them.
Kissmetrics also offers A/B testing, which allows you to experiment with different variations of your website or marketing content to see which performs better. By analyzing the results, you can optimize your website and marketing materials for better conversion rates and increased revenue.
The pricing structure for Kissmetrics is tiered, with different plans available based on your business needs and the number of events you want to track. There is no freemium version available; however, they do offer a free trial to let you explore the platform before committing to a paid plan.
By using the insights from Kissmetrics, you can optimize your marketing campaigns, enhance customer engagement, and boost conversions, ultimately driving business growth.
Amplitude Best for: Analyzing customer engagement and behavior for product teams Comparable to Mixpanel, Amplitude is a customer analytics platform that enables you to construct customer journey maps to gain a better understanding of your existing customer experience.
Early adopters of this solution include Shopify, Ford, Peloton, Webflow, and Pepsico. Amplitude has earned the title of the top product analytics tool on G2, which is quite an accolade.
By integrating with your ecommerce platform, app, or website, Amplitude provides detailed information about your product’s performance. Insights include churn rate, feature engagement, and shopping cart abandonment rates, among other business analytics. Additionally, event tracking allows you to monitor any aspect of your product you deem important.
Amplitude offers A/B testing, cohort creation, and user behavior analysis across multiple devices to delve deeper into these areas. If your goal is to achieve critical mass with a digital product, Amplitude is an excellent investment.
Like most of these tools, there is a freemium version available. For all other tiers, which are priced based on data volume, you’ll need to request a quote.
Google Analytics Best for: SEO analysis and early customer engagement Google Analytics, another well-known name on our list, is a suitable starting point for SMBs seeking to explore prospect behavior. Although you may not gain much insight into your current customers beyond what your CRM provides, Google is an excellent resource for understanding how prospects find your landing pages and interact with your content and advertising.
With Google Analytics, you’ll have access to exclusive data, such as point of origin information, which enables you to see which websites are driving traffic your way. Moreover, startups and small businesses can use Google Analytics for free, provided they have a Google account (which comes with any of Google’s other products, like Drive or Gmail).
Google 360 is available for enterprises seeking top-tier data from the search engine giant, but this option costs $150K per year! Nevertheless, even the free version offers a surprising number of metrics, including sessions, users, average time on page, bounce rate, and more. You can also segment this information by geographic region.
Hotjar Best for: Enhancing websites and products based on feedback Hotjar, a leading analytics platform used by over 900K websites, boasts clients such as Adobe, Nintendo, Decathlon, and Panasonic. This platform utilizes unique features to showcase customer behavior, including page heatmaps (highlighting the most popular areas of your site) and recordings (anonymized screen recordings of individual user actions).
Hotjar also offers plug-in widgets for your site, like feedback forms and surveys, with dozens of integrations available natively or through Zapier. The Hotjar dashboard presents behavioral metrics that go beyond the typical, incorporating customer sentiment (how users feel about your product or service).
By comparing metrics in various snapshots, you can analyze the impact of product changes or site redesigns on customer engagement. Hotjar is one of the platforms that most effectively enables product or service improvement.
Pricing is somewhat complex, with two plans: Observe (for behavioral insights) and Ask (for active feedback). Each plan has several tiers, with free or low-cost options and business versions that vary in cost based on the number of customer sessions (observe) or responses (ask).
For example, the Ask plan costs $289 USD per month for business users with 5000 monthly responses. For businesses requiring 8000 monthly user sessions, the Observe plan costs $589 USD per month.
Pendo Best for: Boosting revenue and converting free trials Pendo focuses on revenue, using customer behavior data to pinpoint your most profitable products and activities. It categorizes users into high or low revenue-generating groups and recommends proportional marketing and sales efforts.
Popular among SaaS B2B clients like Citrix, Insightly, and Infor, Pendo has been successful in enhancing user onboarding engagement and increasing freemium-to-paid subscription conversions. For instance, Insightly reported a 1540% increase in user onboarding engagement while tripling their freemium-to-paid subscription conversions. Pendo’s site claims a 60% boost in free trial conversions.
With an impressive 4.5 stars from nearly 200 reviews on Capterra, Pendo has faced some technical issues with URL tracking. However, their support and customer feedback scores are high, which is reassuring if you encounter any issues during deployment.
As expected, there is a freemium version available. For the three paid tiers, you’ll need to contact their sales team for specific quotes.
Examples of customer analytics in action To give you a sense of how the insights gleaned from the aforementioned platforms can be used to optimize your products, make informed business decisions, convert more prospects, or increase revenue, here are some typical examples:
Acquisition: Understanding where prospects originate, when they arrive at your site, what other products they’re considering, their behavior on your site, and key demographics. Result: Improved landing pages, more effective marketing, and enhanced SEO. Revenue: Identifying the most recurring customers and those with the highest LTV (customer lifetime value). Result: Refined pricing tiers and the development of new add-ons to boost revenue. Retention: Analyzing churn rate, factors causing customers to cancel subscriptions, and which offers, discounts, and demos convert the most prospects. Result: Increased focus on churn reduction measures and better-designed discounts. Engagement: Determining the most popular product features, customer feedback on social media, and the time spent using your service. Result: Enhanced products and additional features to extend time on the platform. These examples demonstrate the types of customer insights that can be obtained from customer data. As software developers continue to innovate more sophisticated algorithms and AI-driven systems each month, it’s essential to stay informed about the latest developments.