How to build a customer profile for direct marketing
Updated: Apr 14, 2022
Why is it important to profile your customers
Learning about your customers ensures you’re more focused on how, what & when you speak to them. By generating a customer profile you’re creating a description of your average customer that ensures your product or service is 100% relevant to exactly their needs.
Without profiling it’s just a best guess!
It’s like buying a present for someone you’ve never met - Are they male or female? What are they likely to be interested in? Do they already have it? Are they likely to need it? How do I get it to them?
What you should consider with profiling?
Common areas you should look at include:
Location
Age
Gender
Occupation
Income
Interests
Based on these general demographics you can already paint a picture of your customers. And the better picture you can build, the easier it becomes to find similar types of customers.
Retail business examples of customer profiling:
Glaisdale Goods
A destination retail outlet selling clothes, gifts & coffee shop
Location of Customers – up to 30/40 min travel time radius
Age – 35+
Gender – Mainly Female
Occupation – Part-time, Family Orientated
Income – Med-high disposable income
Interests - Shopping, Family focused activities
How do you get this information?
There are a number of ways to build a profile, starting with the easiest:
Looking at your customers
Customer surveys
CRM Systems
Web Analytics
Social Media Feeds
Look at your customers
Pretty obvious, but a lot of this information can easily be identified by simply observing your existing customers - these are the people who are already using your business or services – so it makes sense new prospects that fit your existing customer profile would be interested too.
Customer surveys.
These could be printed & distributed at your business, or sent by mail or email. And by offering an incentive for completion you can help refine your understanding of existing customers whilst driving the business forward. Keep them simple and to the point (and remember, if you’re collecting customer data ensure you are in line with the latest GDPR legislation)
CRM Systems
If your business has an automated CRM system there’ll be all sorts of additional information that can be combined to your existing knowledge such as average spend habits, how and when to contact people, last visit/order placed, etc. This can be a goldmine of insights that help ensure your customers are delighted to hear from you!
Web Analytics
Got a website? – then simply use what it already collects. Just by adding an analytic tool to your website-such as Google Analytics- can open up a wealth of information that your website automatically collects from visitors. Which areas of the site are hot (or cold), number of pages visited, optimum day / parts, browse time and so on.
Social Media Feeds
Do you currently only advertise via Social Media such as Facebook/Twitter? In order to use our social media feeds we all divulge basic information like the ones mentioned earlier when creating our accounts. As we use these feeds more information is collected so the social stream can tailor its content to suit your tastes. There’s a huge amount of information on the people who like/follow your page that can be used to create your customer profiles and be used to talk to new people who fit the profile but are not necessarily avid users of social media
What next?
Now you have a clearer picture of your customers you can move to the next stage of segmenting them and planning how/when to speak to them and using those insights to find new ones in your area.
For help & advice with your next print or direct marketing campaign speak to the experts
Call us on 0115 939 9797 or email solutions@edwps.co.uk
