Customer profiling can help your organisation improve targeting and retention by creating a detailed description of your customer base. The analytics technique uses data from a wide range of sources to help you understand customers on a deeper level and align your business with their wants and needs.
The types of data that can be used in customer profiles include demographic, psychographic, geographic and behavioural information. Datamine’s customer profiling draws this data from a range of sources, both internal and external.
DemographicDemographic data includes age, income level, education, profession and number of children in a household. This can come from external sources like publicly available census data or data gathered from your customers – for example, as part of the sign-up process or in a survey.
Psychographic Psychographic data relates to your customer’s internal characteristics – their values, attitudes, preferences, interests and personalities. This type of data can be built from psychographic segmentations like Helix Personas, customer survey information, market research, browsing behaviour or purchasing patterns.
Geographic Geographic data is about the countries, regions, cities and suburbs where your customers live. This information can come from Datamine Retailwatch, census data, sales patterns in your stores and browsing data from your website.
Behavioural Behavioural data is the information that comes from customer interactions with your business. It includes purchases, marketing engagement, social media messages and other communication, page views, clicks and searches. This data comes straight from the source – from your transaction and sales data, internal CRM and sales platforms, or marketing automation platform – making it relatively easy to gather and use.
Ready to build a full picture of your customer base? Talk to the Datamine team today.
Customer segmentation divides your general customer base into groups based on common characteristics, whereas customer profiling uses the same data but draws a far more detailed image of your customer or potential customer.
Customer segmentation helps you understand where your customers are coming from, which ones offer the most value, and how to market to them. Customer profiling takes this information to create a detailed picture of the ‘average customer’ within a segment that represents your customer base or customer groups.
For example: A golfing brand may discover they particularly popular with young, single men (a customer segment). A customer profile would go further to describe their motivations: a young single man who is into socialising, exercise, has lots of free time and likes the latest gear to show off to his mates. This information can now help support your whole business from marketing, sales and product development.
Many Datamine clients use a combination of profiling, segmentation and other solutions to optimise their marketing and strategic work – take a look at our solutions page.
Customer profiling gives your marketing team an ideal customer or customers to target, which helps them develop relevant campaign messaging and strategies.
It’s much easier to sell a product or service if you know who you’re selling to.
Knowing your customers helps you deliver better customer service because you can tailor each approach. For example, profile information may show that customers prefer to be contacted by email or text message rather than phone, or that certain customers want more personalised service from your salespeople.
By identifying the right target customers and giving insight into their wants and needs, customer profiling can make your messaging more effective, which helps you reduce acquisition costs and maximise the value of your marketing budget.
By delivering relevant marketing messages, personalised service and the products and services customers want, loyalty is likely to increase. Customer profiling helps you deliver in all these areas, which can lead to increased loyalty and reduced churn.
