You can pray, you can hope, or you can wish for your business to go booming. However, that is just a gamble on the more losing side. Successful businesses create marketing strategies by collecting customer data and organizing it. If you don’t have this data, your marketing strategy is blind. What you can only do is to hope to reach your target audiences.
Here’s why you should really collect customer data and organizing it:
- This helps you to store and evaluate valuable details about your existing and future customers.
- It allows you to create a consumer database for future marketing and re-targeting activities. Doing so will save the company’s money.
- No need to try so many things to reach potential customers within your target market.
- It allows you to see those who most likely to take action. Those customers are where you should focus your marketing efforts and money.
Most businesses collect customers’ data in three different ways. These ways were proven effective throughout the years. It improves as time goes by, but still acts as a backbone of collecting consumer data. These three methods are:
Collecting Biographical Data
This includes collecting your customers’ names, addresses, contact numbers, and email addresses. If you have an online shop, you can get these data if you have them sign up on your app or site, or whenever they make an order. For a physical store, you can approach your customers or have your staff to collect it from them. Just give them a reason why they should give it. Like, tell them it’s to keep them updated for rewards and promos. Also, don’t miss the opportunity if they call or send an email to complain. Before you begin addressing their concern ask for their biographical data. Other ways to collect it is through warranty card, pre-order forms, rewards card.
Tip: Don’t ask too much right away. It will annoy your customers. Only ask for more demographic information once you have earned their trust. Which is at a later time. You can hand them surveys, but emphasize that it will remain anonymous.
Tracking Customer Behavior
Through technology, this method has become easy to do. Nowadays, there are programs or software that help track your customer’s behavior. For your marketing strategy, these are the information that your program should collect: transaction histories, customer’s activity level on your site or app, and social media behavior.
Tip: For online shops, it is also advisable to add a function that allows your customers to mark their favorites or adding a wishlist. This will help you see which is which.
Purchase from Data Brokers
Aside from biographical data, and demographics, you can purchase data such as driving records, change of address records or census data from a data broker. These data may come from both private and public sources.
For your marketing strategies, it doesn’t end with collecting your customers’ data. You also need to know how to organize it. There are two ways to do so:
- The first one is storing it manually in a spreadsheet. All you need to do is to divide the categories of collected customer data in cells.
- The other one is through customer relationship management (CRM) software. This program allows all the data you receive from customers to be processed in one location and organize it. In fact, it was created for building marketing strategies for businesses. It can analyze customers’ needs, spot trends, etc. Pretty much, having a CRM is the cheat sheet of collecting customers’ data. You just have to buy one or pay for the monthly fee to use it.
Related Topics : HOW TO LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
