Customer Tracking Guide: Strategies, Benefits, and Tools

Customer loyalty is hard to earn, but worth the work. One way businesses build that loyalty is by understanding how customers interact with their brand. That’s where customer tracking comes in.

With customer tracking data, small business owners can gain valuable insights into the customer journey and identify patterns in customer behavior. And learning more about the needs and preferences of your target audience ultimately helps you supercharge your marketing efforts. 

This guide explains how you can track your customers and the ways in which tracking customer data can increase sales and boost customer satisfaction.

What is customer tracking?

Customer tracking is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data, such as demographics, website engagement, and purchase history. Ultimately, tracking customer data can tell you how and why customers engage with your business—for example, revealing whether customers arrive from a social ad or a referral link, or identifying which products customers tend to buy together. 

Customer tracking software, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, can help you collate and analyze customer behavior. A CRM monitors customer interactions and compiles all of your customer data in one place. CRMs can also analyze data points from your sales and marketing tools to identify trends and provide actionable insights. If you feel like you’re in the dark about customer pain points—as well as what interests consumers—effective customer tracking can help turn on the lights and improve the customer journey.

Benefits of customer tracking

• Improve retention and build customer loyalty
• Increase sales using data-driven decisions
• Deliver personalization that your customers expect

When you track customer engagement, you’ll see why customers walk through your door or shop on your website, and how they got there. Here are some other key benefits to tracking how, why, and where customers interact with your business.

Improve retention and build customer loyalty

Customers expect you to pay attention and know their history with your business. In exchange, you’re earning customer loyalty. This is an area where you want to put your CRM software to work and learn more about what the customer experience with your business is really like. 

Your CRM software can give you the insights you need to visualize a customer journey map. You can see how customers discovered your business (such as a referral from another customer, or through an Instagram ad), their purchasing history, and engagement with your customer service channels. Use those key insights to understand what your customers expect from your business so you can deliver it consistently. Give them a reason to keep coming back, because if you don’t, they’ll leave. Adobe found that 86% of the consumers they polled would stop buying from a brand once they felt loyalty was broken. 

Increase sales using data-driven decisions

Tracking customer data helps improve your sales and marketing efforts by giving you insights rooted in your business’s specific data—such as where in the purchasing process customers are most often abandoning the cart on your website—rather than just industry data in general. You can also analyze sales data to see how preferences change over time and then adjust merchandising or promotions accordingly. 

Deliver personalization that your customers expect

Customers don’t want to be just another number. In a survey of 14,300 consumers and business buyers, Salesforce found that 73% expect better personalization as technology advances, and 65% feel businesses should cater to customers’ preferences as they change. 

The more accurate, relevant, and timely data you have about your customers, the better you can personalize your messaging to their needs and tastes. For example, you could create personalized marketing campaigns with emails and social media ads, targeted at specific customer segments. 

What customer information should you track?

Tracking customer data throughout the sales funnel—from awareness through conversion—can give you deeper insights, helping you improve your business strategy and boost your marketing return on investment (ROI). Here are some important types of customer information to track (and analyze with data analytics tools):

• Customer contact information. Tracking customer contact information (such as email addresses when new users fill out a form on your site) will help you build a bank of leads.

• Sales data. With this information (such as conversion rates and closed deals), your sales team will know what your customers are purchasing and when. This data also helps product teams understand which items or features customers want. Use a CRM as part of your tech stack to centralize this information.

• Web traffic data. Learn more about traffic channels (how customers are getting to your site) by tracking customer interactions, seeing where users click on your site, and taking note of traffic patterns on website visits. Google Analytics is a free tool that can help with this.

• Email marketing data. You can use email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp or MailerLite to gather valuable information about reach (how many people see your messaging) and customer engagement. Typical metrics include open rates, clicks, the number of recipients who unsubscribe, and conversion rates.

• Phone data. You can do this by logging information into your CRM systems when customers call in.

• Social media engagement. By analyzing metrics such as engagement and sentiment on social media posts, your marketing team will be able to spot trends in customer preferences.

• Customer feedback. Reading customer feedback on sites like Google or Yelp gives you qualitative data on where your business is succeeding or falling short.

How to track customers

• Use a CRM to gather and analyze customer data
• Optimize your site for customer tracking
• Reach customers efficiently with marketing automation
• Monitor social media sentiment and engagement
• Use AI tools

These best practices will help you gather data and gain new insights, giving you the information you need to better understand your customers and make informed decisions.

Use a CRM to gather and analyze customer data

Before you can track customer behavior, you need a central place to store your customer data. This is where a CRM shines. Instead of keeping data in spreadsheets (though this can work for small operations on a budget), you can use a CRM to collect and analyze customer data from your various platforms, marketing channels, and other customer touchpoints.

CRM data tells you how well your business is doing based on the metrics that matter most to you. These programs contain dashboards that you can configure to showcase the metrics aligned with your business goals, so you can have at-a-glance information like conversion rates or average order size displayed prominently in the user interface. 

Tools you can use:HubSpot, Zoho, Drip, monday, Pipedrive

Optimize your site for customer tracking

Make sure your ecommerce site is set up to track customer data. If you’re comfortable with coding, you can add tracking pixels and customer tags—lines of code that track visitors—to your site. Ecommerce platforms such as Shopify can make this process simpler with built-in analytics tools.

Tools you can use: Shopify, Google Tag Manager, GTmetrix, Adobe Experience Platform Tags

Reach customers efficiently with marketing automation

Actions like lead nurturing (following up with potential customers and encouraging them to convert) and customer segmentation (grouping customers based on preferences, demographics, or purchase history) take time and money. 

Many small businesses use marketing automation tools to do this. These tools connect to your CRM and use the customer tracking data you’ve collected to automatically send welcome emails, nurture leads, perform customer segmentation, and keep all of your marketing information in one place—boosting your marketing team's performance.

Tools you can use: Shopify, HubSpot, Klaviyo, GetResponse, Tidio

Monitor social media sentiment and engagement

Whether it’s through your social media channels, emails, or review sites such as Yelp or Google, your customers have a lot to say. Reviews and comments are a great way to learn directly from your customers—the good and the bad. You can also analyze social media sentiment on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to see not just engagement, but the emotions behind those comments.

Tools you can use: Sprout Social, Buffer, Hootsuite, Qualtrics

Use AI tools

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to mature, you can use this technology to better understand your customers. Small businesses can use AI tools for:

• Customer data collection. AI tools can collect and analyze data in real time. For instance, an AI-powered chatbot on your ecommerce site collects data from every customer question, giving you a look into what your customers want to know.

• Insights on demand. Instead of spending hours going through your customer data to learn more about customer segments, you can use AI tools like Shopify Sidekick to surface that information instantly.

• Trend analysis. AI tools can review your customer data and trends from social media platforms like TikTok, and generate a summary that tells you what your customers want now.

• Predictive analytics. AI tools can use your customer data to offer predictive insights and suggestions. For example, AI can review customer data from the past fiscal year and suggest products you should stock or promote in marketing messaging next quarter.