What is customer profiling?
Customer profiling is the result of analysing and studying your customer data to create clear categorised groups based on key characteristics. These groups and characteristics help to create a clear picture of your ideal customer profiles, with groups typically based on:
- Demographic: Age, Gender, Job Title, Income, Education level, Family status
- Psychographic: Lifestyle, Goals, Pains, Habits, Values, Interests
- Behavioral: Engagement, Readiness to buy, Purchasing history, satisfaction, loyalty, account age, attention required
- Geographic: City, Area, Region, Country
How can Eight Digital help with your customer profiling?
We can help enrich your data with external data sources that help provide greater insights such as social factors and purchase behaviours. Combining these data sources to analyse and segment your data, we are able to provide you with distinct categories, groups and types. These are known as customer profiles.
Doing this allows us to do the following types of activity.
- Help identify your top customer based on frequency & recency of purchase/activity and value to target.
- Highlight where targeted campaigns could be most effective based on your customer geo-demographics.
Why are customer profiles useful for business and marketing?
Customer profiling helps to understand your customers better, knowing their habits, needs and preferences. It allows you to communicate more effectively and engage with greater success. It allows for data driven targeted marketing, focusing on groups which are more likely to deliver the results you want.
In brief customer profiling can help businesses to:
- Create more accurate objectives & potential campaign forecasts
- Increase customer engagement and loyalty
- Allow accurate targeting based on segments created using profiling data.
- Improve marketing communications through a more personalised marketing experience and in turn improve your return on investment
- Have clear measurements and benchmarks of performance
- Deliver account-based marketing strategies with success.
An example of the power of customer profiling.
From your data, you may know two customers who bought the exact same product from you. Through enriching your data and creating clear customer profiles you know now that one customer owns their own 3 bed house whilst the other rents a one bed apartment.
Had the item been a high end footstool, the items you then choose to upsell or cross-sell are going to be very different now knowing their living situation. The one in the house you may also think about a large 3 seater sofa, beds, and outdoor furniture. Whilst the one bed apartment might be a cosy chair and accessories or storage solutions.
How to create a customer profile?
There are many ways you can go about creating a customer profile however essentially they all follow these steps:
- Consolidate all possible GDPR-compliant customer data. Perhaps from your CRM system, if you are an ecommerce business, maybe you have details on your customers’ purchase channels, product mix, revenue per customer, if they are a member of your loyalty scheme, how many years they have shopped/brought from your business, etc. Once all collated it is essential to remove duplicates and have a spring clean if possible. This will become the bones of your customer profile.
- Through 3rd party data sources you can glean even further information such as demographic, behaviours, trends, income, home ownership etc. This is where we can really help you. This information in addition to your internally gathered data really helps to give a clear understanding of what your customers habits, wants and needs are.
- Now you can segment your data into clear customer profiles. Combined with population attitudes and behaviours, we can provide quality actionable insights to market to your target audience with.
Troubleshooting when creating a customer profile?
If you are struggling with compiling and consolidating your data we might be able to help here too. We provide a range of data solutions from data cleansing to finding new look-a-like customers with Partially Addressed Mail.
If you would like to explore what options would be best suited to you and your database. We are just at the end of the phone so get in touch with one of our team or send us an email enquiry now.
