Customer profiling has burst forcefully into modern marketing and is a practice that companies and e-commerce sites cannot do without. This tool makes it possible to collect and exploit the whole enormous flow of data that companies take in every day, so as to understand what customers’ habits, preferences and even hobbies are, in order to draw up a complete profile.
Before customer profiling, marketing was anonymous and impersonal. Advertising messages were “fed” to consumers, without being targeted or following a precise strategy. Today this technique is unproductive and useless, since consumers do not want a standard product, but want it personalised according to their specific needs.
By profiling customers it is possible to guarantee them a pleasant and consistent customer experience. In this way you can build customer loyalty and increase earnings by adopting simple measures. The partners who have relied on us have managed to target their customers, increasing sales by 19% and improving customer satisfaction by 23%.
What is customer profiling?
Before getting to know the “best practices” to adopt, let’s focus on the meaning of customer profiling. It is an activity to be carried out with constancy and meticulousness with the aim of collecting as much customer data as possible, so as to know them and create targeted advertising campaigns. In this way you can optimise your investments and make sure that the customer returns to buy from you.
By launching a targeted advertising campaign you can reach your objectives more easily. In practice it is like casting the fishing rod’s hook into a small pond rather than into the open sea: you are certain that your customers will “bite”. Consumers are in fact interested in what you propose and you can count on a higher return on your investments.
We can thus summarise the advantages of customer profiling:
- more direct and targeted communication;
- cutting of advertising costs;
- customer loyalty, whereby the customer is more likely to return to buy from you;
- an increase in the number of customers and in sales;
- a correct marketing strategy;
- rapid clearing of stock in the warehouse.
How to profile customers
The profiling of business customers is not, however, a simple practice, in the sense that it must in any case be personalised according to your own needs.
Customer profiling for an e-commerce site that sells clothing should focus on the age, style and accessories most used by its customers.
On the contrary, a restaurant should inform itself about the culinary habits of its customers: whether they prefer red or white wine, when they go out to dinner most frequently, and so on.
Customer profiling in a shop selling sports items should assess the sport most practised by customers, the type of products purchased, the times at which they prefer to shop, and so on.
To have a clearer picture of the situation, here below is a list of the best practices for profiling clientele correctly.
Customer profiling marketing: analysis of the database
Customer profiling can be understood as a sort of funnel, which narrows more and more until it reaches the objective. In this process a constantly updated database is necessary, one that contains demographic and socioeconomic data. Age, gender, race, earnings, work, level of education and many other factors are essential elements from which to start your research.
The psychographic items are also important, such as hobbies, interests, concerns and anxieties. By having this data available you can more easily intercept customers’ needs, providing a service or a product tailored to measure for them.
What behavioural analysis is
After having collected the data in a generic way, you can move on to behavioural analysis, that is, the study of consumers’ behaviours and their decisions during the purchasing phase.
The analysis starts from the study of online and offline behaviours: which emails are opened most by customers? Which blog posts attract the most attention? What type of feedback arrives? When did peaks in sales occur? What are the reasons why customers always buy from you? How much do they spend on average? By answering these questions you can proceed to a further step for customer profiling.
How to present the product to the customer
After having learned everything about your customer, here we are at the definitive step: presenting the product in the right way, highlighting its main positive aspects based on their needs. If you have done the job well, to use a football expression, you will have to take a penalty into an empty net: you cannot miss!
Last step: measuring the effectiveness of the advertising campaign
For your strategy to be successful you have to continually update and analyse the data, because customers’ habits themselves and market trends can change. In this way you will always be “on the ball”, providing an “ad hoc” service for your audience.
Are you ready to face the new changes and the new challenges?
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