The more information about your customers you can collect, the better. However, demanding data or bombarding your valuable customers with requests for what is often personal information can be totally counterproductive.
So what should you be doing to collect the data you need?
Read On:
How big data helps convert customers
What data should you collect from customers?
Big data: a user guide
From orders
The obvious place to start is to collect as much data as you think you can get away with collecting when anyone orders from you. Any order is certainly going to generate a name and address and some form of payment detail. It can also be the point at which you garner phone numbers and perhaps even birth date.
Ask them to register
Many retailers ask new customers to register with them at the point of first purchase at that site. This can be incentivized (incentives for giving data will, as you shall see, become something of a theme) by helping it to speed future purchases, but you need to explain this and be honest.
Why not offer them the chance to register with the invitation that “To speed future purchases and so that we can get to know you better and serve you better, why not register here with a few more details…”
This could help generate a much richer picture of the consumer in one simple hit right at the start of your relationship with them.
Transactions
Following the money is probably the easiest thing to do. If any visitor to your site does convert then it is essential that you keep data on the payment – not only for data purposes for marketing, but for your financial records.
The key thing is to be able to match this data with the order and registration data you have already gathered and then to be able to build a picture of the customer’s spending habits from this.
Competitions
If registration isn’t giving you the data you are looking for, or you simply want to reach out and get some data of non-customers, then competitions are an ideal way to do this – although you may have to buy in data to get the ball rolling, so it is a bit of a catch 22.
That said though, offering some sort of merchandise related prize in effect in return for their data is a great way to generate new data.
It also, if the prize is good, can be passed on by the initial round of targets to their friends and via social media – extending the reach of such data gathering to like-minded but to you unknown new customers.
But bear in mind there are rules governing competitions, so make sure you don’t fall foul of the law.
Surveys
In a similar vein to competitions – though admittedly not as much fun, unless you add a prize draw – are surveys.
Get customers and potential customers to complete a survey about you and your business or even a related subject and, as part of that ask them for data that you want – name, address, contact details, job and so on. As said, they have to be incentivized usually through a prize draw or similar.
From your site
Google Analytics clearly offers a very good insight into what the people hitting your site are doing, looking at, buying and – perhaps most presciently – rejecting.
The tools available here and around whoever hosts your website and services can provide excellent insight into what is happening on your site and therefore in your business. Use it.
Use it alongside all the other data you can gather and use this to create not just views of your customers, but perhaps unorthodox views of trends.
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