Ever wondered how a conglomerate like Amazon, which dabbles in both the B2B and B2C space, often knows what its customers want? Clearly, they don’t hire magicians who are interstitial, meaning who know everything.
However, what they do well is “mine data,” be it from an internal or external database, to build and serve their gargantuan customer base better. The most prominent way for Amazon to mine data is by tracking a potential customer’s activity on its website. This is especially true for Amazon’s e-retail portal.
The customer data mined by Amazon helps them answer the following questions:
- What pages are customers looking at, and when?
- How often do they negatively review Amazon’s services?
- How much time do they spend browsing each page?
- What is their shipping address?
And much more.
Amazon also mines data, especially demographic data, from external sources like census databases worldwide.
So, why does an already successful behemoth organization go through the trouble of mining data? Simple, it helps them know their customers intimately and hyper-personalize business offerings. Doing this is a win-win as the customers are pitched with products they need without having to go through Amazon’s massive list of products.
As a result of Amazon’s data mining, customers feel valued and consider Amazon a reliable partner, whereas Amazon finds it easier to have a never ending sales pipeline.
Additional Read: 7 Emerging Trends In Information Technology 2023
Now that you have Amazon’s data mining example, do you want to start mining data? Before that, let’s quickly understand what defines data mining.
What is Customer Data Mining?
Customers generate tonnes of data with each click of their handheld devices. This creates mountains of valuable information which is unusable in raw form. Companies make it usable by employing data mining.
Therefore, customer data mining turns raw and unstructured data into comprehensible and consumable insights. Mining data, be it for any area of your business, like sales, operations, finance, marketing, etc., allows you to scope trends and patterns.
Types of Data mining:
Broadly, there are two types of data mining that are most commonly leveraged by businesses today. Let’s understand them in detail.
Predictive Data Mining
The primary objective of predictive data mining is to help organizations predict an outcome. By harvesting data and running predictive algorithms on it, companies can figure out what may happen with a certain product or service trend in the future.
You can further classify this type of data mining into four categories:
- Regression Analysis
- Classification Analysis
- Time Serious Analysis
- Prediction Analysis
Descriptive Data Mining
Descriptive data mining primarily aims to turn any given dataset into relevant insights for businesses. It provides co-relation, cross-tabulation, etc., by studying past data decks.
You can further classify this type of data mining into four categories:
- Summarization Analysis
- Clustering Analysis
- Sequence Discovery Analysis
- Association Rules Analysis
Additional Read: How Account-Based Marketing Helps Healthcare Industry?
The Top 5 Data Mining Techniques:
Now you may feel like you can’t get started on data mining without an analyst, but you can. Sure, eventually, you should hire a data expert, especially to achieve your data’s true potential, but here are the five most common data mining techniques you can begin with-
1. Warehousing Customer Data
First things first, businesses that delve into data mining begin by identifying the systems that they will use to store all incoming customer data. This technique is called data warehousing. The term warehouse is, of course, metaphorical here. It refers to a repository of tools required to store data.
These often include dedicated servers, dataset software, spreadsheets, etc. Know that data warehousing forms the foundation of customer data mining.
2. Cleansing Customer Data
Picture this technique similar to chiseling an identifiable form from a mountain. Here the mountain is raw data, and the form refers to error-free actionable customer data. Your data warehouse must comprise customer information that is free from duplicities, typos, and other such redundancies.
Data cleansing assures your customer data stack is top-quality, thus ensuring you identify the right buyer trends and patterns.
3. Association and Classification of Customer Data
The techniques of association and classification are only possible once the first two steps are complete. Classification refers to leveraging cleansed data from the data warehouse to find causality and correlations between different data types.
For example, suppose a particular set of customers from a specific sector often purchase a certain type of product or service. In that case, you can correlate these factors to create stronger pitches later.
As for the classification technique, it means categorizing your data under a set of parameters. Doing this helps you study and act upon data quickly. The primary challenge companies face while classifying customer data is identifying the parameters to place data in.
4. Regression of Customer Data
This data mining technique helps put a number on products and services with the help of classified and associated data points. For example, suppose you want to predict the price of a product that customers would be comfortable with. You can arrive at a figure by mining data through regression.
5. Deep Data Analytics
This technique aids in turning raw data into subjective or objective insights to help you make better marketing, sales, or any other business decisions. Companies often leverage specific business intelligence software to perform a variety of data analytics.
Parting Thoughts:
Customer data matters, but mined customer data matters more!
The fine line between raw and mined data is what wins business customers. By mining customer data for nuanced insights, you know what your customers are looking for, their ever-altering preferences, challenges, and need gaps. And, accordingly, you can tailor your offerings for maximum ROIs.
But if you want to make the process more efficient and quick, consider buying a user database from a reliable provider. At Mail-Prospects, we offer 100% accurate and verified databases with an 85% deliverability guarantee. Get your free sample today.
References:
- https://blog.hubspot.com/website/data-mining
- https://www.zuar.com/blog/data-mining-for-marketing-8-practical-examples/
- https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/data-warehouse/data-mining.shtml
- https://www.iberdrola.com/innovation/data-mining-definition-examples-and-applications
- https://www.javatpoint.com/types-of-data-mining
