Data, Data of the World, Who’s the Omniscient of Them All?
Can data really help you make a better decision?
I am a 100% data-driven person before — Once I got a taste of how data analysis could make a huge difference in my work, I became almost crazy about data.
However, what is the most important for a marketer? People always talk about how a company fell into a decision-making crisis because of not using enough data. Faced with the pressure of enormous cost loss caused by failed decisions, decision-makers always try every means to obtain product and user data of competing companies to ensure the correctness of their choices. However, decision errors caused by excessive reliance on market data are more common instead.
Back to the original topic, what is the most important for marketers?
Listening to our customers and thinking of ourselves as customers. Emotional support and user experience are more important than data analysis to find market positioning.
Here, let’s take a small test together to get a deeper understanding.
Take email marketing as an example:
- The optimal characters count for advertising emails is between 20–40 words.
What is the first thing flashes into your mind if you are an email marketing manager? Check the numbers of your emails words to see if it sends in a “safe” length to keep customers?
The length of an email can be a point that needs to be examined properly because it can indicate when the audience will lose patience in reading emails.
However, it is just one of the tools that help you to increase customer engagement.
The psychology of customers is very complicated. Some people like colorful emails style; some prefer emails with many expressions that can show all the content in one motion picture. While competitive companies and market reports are undoubtedly informative, each company’s own customers’ preferences are different. Rather than relying on data to adjust the content of your projects, it is more important to carefully study your own customers’ psychology, listen to them, and pay attention to what they need. Optimizing the content of emails or products based on customers, all products and promotions, are part of the user experience and a pivotal point to upgrading customers into loyal ones.
Reflections:
One of the severe dangers of relying too much on data and market analysis can lead to rigid thinking. As mentioned above, the length of the email is only one indicator to help improve the effective reading of the email. It is also essential that the content of the email is engaging, such as whether it has cute stickers, what font to use, and how many GIF emoticons to use. What is one rigid way of thinking that this can create — — market reports state that XXX brand has high email open rates because they have about 10 Gif stickers in one email. 5–10 branded GIF stickers can effectively increase email open rates. So people started to change their email content based on the report — we need to increase the number of GIF stickers because it will attract more people to open and read our emails. But in reality, because each company has a different tone, it attracts a different group of customers. A cosmetic company that focuses on ingredients may attract customers who prefer to receive emails with detailed product descriptions. In contrast, a cosmetic company with beautiful packaging may prefer emails with pretty, cute GIFs that don’t require much thought.
Human beings cannot live without emotions. The fear of the unknown and the difficulty of studying users’ psychology is perhaps one reason marketers rely so much on data because they want something tangible that can describe the situation concretely. But this is not difficult. The easiest way is to think of yourself as a consumer. The customer is right there, and talking to them directly and listening to what they feel is far more vital than data.
Before using data to understand the world, how about caring about the people living in the world first?
