Data Driven Marketing For Dummies

Chapter 8

Getting the Most from Your Transaction Data

In This Chapter

Summarizing transaction data at the customer level

Creating behavior-based customer segments

Understanding seasonality and customer purchase cycles

Using transaction data to identify opportunities

You can learn a great deal about your customers by paying attention to what they’re doing. Your company’s transaction systems contain a wealth of data about how customers are behaving. In this chapter, I use the word transaction in a much broader sense than just sales transactions. In essence, I consider any customer interaction with your business to be a transaction.

Certainly purchases are transactions. But so are returns. A phone call to your call center, registering and logging on to your website, and searching for a particular product on your website all count as transactions. When trying to make use of transaction data, you typically run into three obstacles:

Not all your transaction data is tied to individual customers. ...