What Is Customer Profiling?
Customer profiling is all about getting to know your customers and the similarities between them. With a good customer profile you can market to them at the right time with the right products or services.
Many companies say that they know who their customers are and they market to them accordingly. When pushed they can rarely give a full profile of their customers and when pushed further still they will often admit they have no way of monitoring who their best and worst customers are other than by the amount they spend.
How do you know who is your best or ideal returning loyal customer and how do you know who is your worst and only buying from you when you give them special offers and so on?
What Type of Profile
There are many different types of profile for online and offline customers that you can break down in many different ways.
Your ideal customer may be a single, technology friendly male executive with plenty of spare income, or it could be an OAP with spare time and money but fear of technology. It could be married men with 2.4 children, little spare income but many interests. It could be a B2B buyer with £500k of budget per year who buys at certain peak times, reads certain trade magazines as well online articles, or it could be a financial director who reads the financial papers, plays gold on Sunday and makes the budget decisions.
Your worst customer could be any of these types who just sits on the Internet price comparison sites or awaits offer emails and only buys when they can get a cheaper better deal from you, but as soon as someone else offers something cheaper or better they move on with no loyalty.
With the online world being used more and more for purchases customers know they have the power, and brand loyalty can be lost in just a few clicks. So knowing who your ideal customers are and what their needs and wants are is important to marketing to them, giving them exclusive special offers and keeping them loyal to you in an increasingly fickle market. Remember the competition is only a few clicks away.
How to Build a Profile
Ok so you have a need to know who your best and worst customers are but how do you do it? Well here there are many techniques. One way is through market research or customer profiling calls made by a telemarketing company or agent. As long as this is done in the right way it can be a great way of gaining information and understanding your customer more personally.
You can also run a market research campaign by sending a questionnaire with the offer of a free gift or exclusive offer to 100 or more of your most frequent and loyal customers to see what the similarities are. You could do this via email or post or as part of the buying process to get discounts on their future purchases.
With this info you can then build the profile of your ideal customer. Who they are, what they do and what they like to do.
Understand Customer Behaviour
Next you need to understand their behaviour both online and offline. What causes them to buy? What drives that buying decision? What they are looking for?
If you have an integrated eCRM system that identifies your customers whether they call or go online then you will also be able to track their behaviour. Their search patterns, what they are looking for, how long they stay on each page and certain areas, what are the similarities between what they buy and others. You will also know if they go from online search to buying offline and so on.
By understanding what they are looking for or might be looking for you can advertise online on your website or via email and so on to their needs. If you know where they are looking or will be looking online you can place special call to action advertising and offers in these areas. With some cookie technology you can make these exclusive to certain ideal customers and not your worst. Meaning that your marketing is more targeted than ever not only to your customers' needs but also to your ideal customers' needs.
Tracking Customers and Making Exclusive Offers
If you know your customers' behaviour and profile you can use this to market to their needs and guide them to a buying decision. Targeting what they see and directing them where to go all the way to the buying stage. Even if they leave without buying you know they were there and interested in a certain product or service and you can use this information to send them a targeted timely offer on that product with a special time constrained call to action such as buy within the next hour to get this exclusive offer.
