As the Martech sphere undergoes major changes, customer segmentation, targeting & analysis techniques are going to go through some significant transformations. Marketing has always been a prerequisite to product since studying and analyzing demand is what precedes supply. 

Assessing consumers and their individual and collective interests gives marketers useful insights into how, where, and when to target the relevant audience. 

But as the digital platforms move towards a cookie-less online world and try to eliminate third-party information usage, marketers will now have to rethink and restructure the customer data collection process.

Cohort Analysis can be considered to be the future of marketing given that data privacy and protection concerns are on a rise. With several data leaks taking place in recent times and big players like Facebook getting scrutinized for their data protection laws and practices, privacy has become the first priority for all customers as well as brands & enterprises that use customer data. While the importance of customer data collection remains the same, there needs to be more vigilance around the ways enterprises are using and disseminating this data so that it does not threaten customers’ privacy.  

Let’s start with understanding cohort-analysis-based marketing and how it is actually beneficial and can prove to be the future of marketing and advertising. 

A cohort is a group of people who have something in common during a specific time period. The parameters of this group are generally identified based on the question you want the analysis to answer and the metrics determined to be significant. For business purposes, a cohort, for example, maybe people who have downloaded an app during a particular month or a group of people who have bought a particular product within the first week of its launch.  

The most important element is the parameter used to classify people into groups, without which they would not give any significant information. 

Concentrated efforts are being made towards the preservation of the digital rights of consumers, cohort analysis will be the most sought-after technique to collect data. It will do away with cookies and deal with people, their interests and affinities, no one-on-one, but in cohorts that will be more effective. 

Cohort analysis can help brands analyse customer behavior that affects the continuity of business. It informs about steps that did not translate into required results leading to change in business metrics, e.g. customer retention. 

A deep cohort analysis study based on acquisition time period can also help calculate the customer lifetime value of a user, for e.g. classifying and studying the exact time a group of customers signed up for your services and using it to estimate their worth to the company over time. 

Cohort analysis can also help facilitate effective customer engagement as the brand would know about the behavioural pattern of a group of customers and campaigns could be formulated accordingly. 

With several other advantages to offer, cohort analysis seems to be the future of the Martech sphere, proving to be the safest and most effective choice to carry out its marketing efforts.