An example of Data Analysis -how I thinking and expend the value of analysis result

Many people believe that data analyst must have to acquire a good knowledge of math, statistic or programming, while, in my opinion, the most important ability is the idea, a good data analyst always think how to push company growth with scientific methods and providing data support for decision-making. Today, I want to share a real example that I work in online education company before to show how I thinking. This project’s goal is enhancing client’s renewal rate.

Thinking the problem to get the possible solution

This picture shows a progress that how our company promote client renew by EDM.

• Marketing department send EDM to customers
• Customers open and read the mail
• Customers click the ”contact me” button if they have interesting
• Sales introduce our renewal product to customer and close

Thinking about what data analysis can do according to this progress? Trying to increase EDM-open rate? It is an intuitive thinking and an important issue but it is marketer’s responsibility. Marketing colleagues pay attention to the hot topic of the market at any time, they know what wording or landing page is more attractive, they can do better than me.

Trying to increase button-click rate? Most people are price-sensitive, so we can push customer click the button easily by incentive fee, such as “renew and get free iPad / iPhone “. While it is not a good idea because there is no data can support this decision and it is not a fundamental solution for me.

Is there any key point I can analysis? Who gets our EDM? I ask marketing colleague this question, they told me that EDM is sent to all customers whose contract will be expired next month. Why do we not just focus those high-renew customers? If we just send EDM to those customers whose renewal probability is higher, the close rate must increase. So the problem now is what kind of customer have higher renewal probability?

Analysis and test finding

I query historical purchase data of our client with SQL and analyze difference profile between renew users and non-renew user, including material differences, course completion rate, etc., a discovery that the renew user’s attendance rate is significantly higher than the non-renew user, especial the first three month.

Next, I test my finding, I just send EDM to those high-renew customers and observe the performance every day. In addition, I also require sales team give me their feedback in order to help me judge it. Unsurprising, the performance at this time is better than ever.

Make the analysis result more valuable

I have got the valuable result and it makes sense, if new customers use our service more, they will have higher loyalty, so I do three things to encourage clients to attend courses more. I promote relevant strategies with IT, sales department and marketing department:

1. IT department create a new function to remind clients to book courses if they do not attend for 2 weeks.
2. Marketing strategy: for new users, if they attend courses over 15 classes, offer extra courses for free.
3. Business strategy: set up the old customer business group to contact client before Expiration.

At first, my job is increasing renewal rate, now I not only finish this mission according to my analysis but also develop a company’s renewal strategy.

I want to emphasize that statistics and any analysis software just a tool, the most important is how to create a valuable analysis result because your boss just wants to know what is the problem and how to optimize or fix it, give boss your finding and suggestion, do not only describe each KPI is increasing or decreasing.