Customer Profiling: Unlock Deeper Customer Insights

Gain insight into your consumer base using customer profiling. A versatile solution where insights are applied to targeted marketing and retention loyalty.

Improve targeting and retention with customer profiling

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.

 

What is customer profiling?

 

Customer profiling is an analytics and marketing approach that uses data to create detailed, accurate portraits of your customers.  It can be used to build a picture of your ideal customer or customers from various target groups and compare differences between segments.  

Either way, the purpose is to deepen your understanding of your customers – their behaviours, preferences, motivations, demographics and desires.  With these insights, you can tailor your products, services and marketing strategies to better fit your audience.  

 

Why is customer profiling important?

 

Customer profiling is an important tool for strategic planning and day-to-day decision-making.  It gives your data a human face, making it far easier for your leadership, sales and marketing teams to understand.

Internally, profiling can drive strategic direction and functional decisions around product ranges, service options and marketing tactics.  Customer profiles can also be used with external providers and partners – for example, sharing profile insights with your advertising agency or manufacturer gives context and could help them deliver a better result.  

Types of data used in customer profiles

 

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.

 

Data WarehouseDemographic

Demographic 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.

 

SegmentationPsychographic

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.

 

GlobeGeographic

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.

 

TrolleyBehavioural

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 now.

 

The difference between customer profiling and customer segmentation

 

Customer profiling and customer segmentation are related but have distinctly different goals.  Customer segmentation divides your general customer base into groups based on common characteristics.  It helps you understand where your customers are coming from, which ones offer the most value, and how to market to them.

Customer profiling uses the same data but draws a far more detailed image of your customer or potential customer.  While you don’t literally build a profile of each individual person, you do get a detailed picture of the ‘average customer’ within a segment that represents your customer base or customer groups.  

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.

Benefits of effective customer profiling

 

The benefits of effective customer profiling include better customer targeting, increased loyalty, reduced churn and lower customer acquisition costs.  The better you know and understand your customers, the more effective your marketing and service can be.

Community

Improved campaign targeting

It’s much easier to sell a product or service if you know who you’re selling to.  Customer profiling gives your marketing team an ideal customer or customers to target, which helps them develop relevant campaign messaging and strategies.

Mobile-1

Better customer service

Similarly, knowing your customers helps you deliver better customer service.  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.

 

Statistical Modelling

Reduce customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost of converting a new customer to your brand.  By helping you identify the right target customers and giving you 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.

 

Collaboration

Increase loyalty, reduce churn

How can you keep customers coming back, over and over?  By delivering relevant marketing messages, personalised service and the products and services customers want.  Customer profiling helps you deliver in all these areas, which can lead to increased loyalty and reduced churn.

How Datamine can improve customer insights with profiling

 

Datamine’s customer profiling service is designed to give you better customer insights, which flow through to improved marketing, customer service, product development and strategic direction.  We help organisations put customers at the heart of everything they do.  The Datamine team draws on data from a wide range of sources – including internal datasets, market research, census data and more – to build a detailed picture of your customer or customers.

The goal is not to have profiles end up as a pretty picture forgotten on the wall (although that can help!) but to embed the use of profiles from planning through to execution and reporting.  Give your leadership and marketing teams a cohesive, easy-to-understand resource to draw from when they develop new campaigns or make decisions around strategy.

Need to know more about your customer base? Talk to one of our experts now.

 

4 components of a great customer retention strategy
Customer retention blog res

4 components of a great customer retention strategy

Sep 19, 2019 8:52:18 AM 5 min read
Want to Create an Exceptional Customer Experience?

Want to Create an Exceptional Customer Experience?

Dec 4, 2023 2:18:36 PM 4 min read
3 Paths to Deeper Insight

3 Paths to Deeper Insight

Jul 6, 2022 12:38:49 PM 3 min read
DM Guide to Customer Retention

DM Guide to Customer Retention

1 min read

Case study: NON PROFIT

 

When Wellington’s Cancer Society wanted to maximise the ROI on its marketing work, it turned to Datamine for help.  Because it’s funded by donors, the charity organisation needs to be particularly careful about how it spends its money.

The solution: In-depth donor profiling

The Datamine team pulled in internal data, census information, data from the deprivation index and Quotable Value NZ to build a very detailed picture of five key donor groups – from low value to high.  They compared each group to the wider donor base using variables like age, occupation, location, property value, average donation and donation frequency.

The result: Insights at a glance  

To present the data, the Datamine team developed a comparison chart that broke down similarities and differences between donor groups.  They also produced a set of maps that showed donor penetration and value across the Wellington region.  Using these resources, the Cancer Society was able to make strategic shifts in its donor outreach campaigns, improving targeting, relevance and ROI.

 

Clients we have provided customer profiling for

 What's Next? 

Give your data a human face

Sometimes, it can be hard to translate numbers into human insights.  Raw data doesn’t necessarily turn into great marketing or useful strategy – even if it’s comprehensive and accurate.

Datamine’s customer profiling service acts as your data translator, pulling relevant insights from various sources and turning them into a clear picture of a customer or group.  This gives your marketing and leadership teams a target to focus on, which helps them deliver more relevant messaging and make the right strategic decisions for your organisation.  

Want to find the human side of your data? Fill in our contact form, and we’ll be in touch.