Today’s digital marketplace offers unbridled reach and unbridled understanding of your customers, but only if you collect the right data about them. knowing what you should know about them is becoming something of a science.
What it really is for is to aid marketing. Talking to your customers as individuals and offering them goods that are what they like, or what you hope they will like, is now expected by consumers. But knowing what to collect to help facilitate this can be tricky.
Read On:
Big data: uses for eSellers
Big data: a user guide
Decoding customer data to optimise your store
So what data should you be looking to collect and why?
The essentials: name, address and other contact details
One of the fundamental things to collect is the name and address of your customers as you deal with them. Sounds basic and it is, but it is vital to allowing for anything remotely linked to personal marketing and personalized service.
It also allows you to contact them directly and instigate all those simple but effective personalized services like order tracking and information about delays and problems. Phone numbers and email addresses are also vital to have for that personal touch.
Vital: profile, age and gender
While knowing their name and address is vital, knowing the basics about who they are is critical to any sort of marketing programme and any understanding of your customers.
You need to know what sex they are, what age they are and other ‘profile’ data points such as their marital status, whether on not they own their own home, whether or not they have kids or even pets can all help with the personalization of marketing and in working out who your customers are and so how you should run your business.
Pretty vital: Income, profession and hobbies
While sex and age and ‘status’ are key profilers, they can be hugely augmented by also knowing what your customers do for a living, how much they earn – roughly – and their hobbies and interests.
If you know that the majority of your customers go to the gym or commute, then maybe you should be advertising in gyms or on trains. If you know that they probably have spare cash then you can offer them the more expensive things you sell.
Handy to have: Transaction history
Knowing what customers have bought with you is very useful and should already be part of your records. This data allows you to understand what they like and start to build a profile of what they tend to go for, how much they spend and so on.
This helps with designing personalized marketing and creation of what seem like personalized offers to your customers.
Intriguing to have: Spending history
Once you have amassed enough data on existing customers you can start to build up quite an interesting picture as to not only what they buy, but also how and when.
This data can help you see if they impulse buy, watch for bargains, buy every month, and what things they tend to but together. It also gives you an insight into how often their payment card works or not and helps you manage cashflow and spot bad payers.
Nice to have: Birthdays
Knowing the birthday of customers – and even those of their relatives – can be useful as you can send them birthday greetings for that personal touch and even offer them money off as a birthday treat.
Slice and dice it
The real key to all this is how you slice and dice all this information.
You can choose to collect all of it or some of it, but you then need to look at how to mix and match it all to get the picture of the customer that you want – or indeed need – to help marketing and retain business, ensure pass on trade and help with subtle upsell and cross sell.
This will depend on the specifics of your business.
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