Getting Started With Customer Data Profiling

Here are a few areas that we consider “low hanging fruit” – activities that can offer glimpses into who we’re doing business with, and help us create better marketing communications to get more people like them on our side.

Profiling

Rather than relying on random primary market research to describe your customer base, think about profiling your database to get an accurate description of them demographically, psychographically, or otherwise. Pyschographics provide a wonderful way to peel back the layers of your visitors. Most market research approaches using sampling and surveys provide neither the depth nor breadth of understanding that a database profile can. Why rely on a small sample customer survey to learn more about their demographics when you can profile the entire database?

Prospecting

There are several key advantages to having a psychographic profile of your customers at hand. It will help you fish where the fish are. Understanding the unique characteristics and location of your customers helps you find more people like them.

Rather than trying to appeal to (and reach!) everyone, you can focus on those clusters and locations that yield better opportunity. This can result in a much higher degree of focus, and much higher response rates in general. If a destination has a better understanding of, not just WHO their customer is, but WHERE they’re coming from (down to a specific neighborhood), the odds of increasing response rates improve greatly.

Marrying a good profile with your CRM, transaction histories, and data mining can yield highly actionable insights about who buys which product, and why.  Imagine how much more predicable your marketing efforts could become if you leveraged these data sources together.

Media targeting

A psychographic profile will also improve your media targeting. Good database profiling and clustering often comes with a great deal of insight about the media and lifestyle habits of your best customers. Knowing this allows you to spend money with the media types that are engaging your customers best. Why spend money on drive-time radio if it’s clear your best clusters are watching cable, or reading the New York Times online? 

Messaging

Messaging to these key segments can also be greatly improved once you have a keener understanding of who they are. Knowing, for example, that your best customer cluster includes families with teenaged children, who make a combined household income of $120,000, who drive SUVs, and live in the suburbs, can change the kind of message you send them. This household’s motivations are vastly different from an urban household of the same income, without children.