The competition is getting fierce in the marketplace for businesses in terms of market share, customer acquisition, and customer retention. Radical breakthroughs in technology are largely influencing customer behavior, leading them to become more demanding and discerning. Customers, nowadays, expect timely and personalized communications and if you fail to deliver as per their expectations, they might take their business elsewhere.
To stay ahead of the competition, businesses need to target the right prospects with appropriate offerings. However, this is easier said than done. Businesses often find it challenging to understand customer behavior like -
- What kind of customers will you be selling the product/service to?
- Is there any demand for the product at the price you'll charge?
- The right time when customers are likely to make a purchase.
- How to provide services that make the customer feel valued and engaged?
In order to target the right customers and match their expectations, you must have a comprehensive understanding of such questions. This is where customer profiling comes into the picture. It not only allows businesses to address all of the above questions but also help them to efficiently analyze customer data to improve sales and gain market share. The process is used to examine customer’s characteristics including demographic (age/gender), geographic (location), and psychographic characteristics (interests/lifestyle) and analyze past buying behavior to understand who they are and what motivates them to make purchases.
Most organizations prefer to have both customer profiling and segmentation services. These two processes help businesses to study the changing behaviors and factors that encourage people to respond positively. Customer data segmentation helps you segregate the types of customers and groups them with the ones that have similar traits, goals, and motivations. After having all the things clearly defined, you get an accurate representation of your customer base to make smarter, and more effective marketing decisions.
The 6 Profiling Steps That Lead To Productive Marketing
Customer Profiling follows a systematic process that includes:
- Data Cleansing & Validation – The customer data in its raw form will surely have inaccuracies and discrepancies. Thus, it needs to be cleaned and validated prior to its analysis and enhancement.
- Single Customer View – Customer data accumulated from different data sources requires aggregation at a single place to have a clear overview. Thus, disparate data are combined in an individual customer view to seamlessly analyze customers’ information, including email responses, product purchases, and brochure downloads together.
- Data Enhancement – Your existing customer data is supplemented with additional data such as age, gender, income, hobbies and consumer classifications. This allows you to develop better customer understanding, which leads to better decision making.
- Customer Segmentation – The data is then grouped into similar characteristics like demographics, purchasing behavior etc.
- Strategy Alignment – With the above steps, you will get clearly defined and segmented data which can be further examined to develop exclusive strategies for each target group.
- Targeted Marketing – After developing a marketing strategy, targeted marketing is implemented via mediums that are likely to reach potential customers.
The Key Benefits That Businesses Get With Customer Profiling
You already know that customer profiling provides valuable customer insight which helps in driving effective marketing strategies. Apart from customer knowledge, some of the key benefits that businesses acquire with profiling are:
- Enhanced Customer Experience – Having insight on customer’s specific interests allows you to tailor relevant communications which will result in enhanced experience, engagement and improved sales.
- Increased Response Rates – With targeted business email lists, you get to reach out to the right audience with the right offerings at the right time. This not only drives better campaign results but also save time and resources. Proper customer insights lead your prospects towards the buying process.
- Customer Loyalty – If you know your customers and give them personalized services, you can make them feel recognized and valued. This will significantly improve the customer experience and customer loyalty.
- Customer Acquisition – Understanding your genuine customers will enable you to look for similar prospects having alike characteristics. Such prospects will have a higher propensity to be interested in your offerings and make the purchase.
- Opportunity Sizing – Having in-depth knowledge about your potential customers enables you to focus the resources where it matters. A significant percentage of your potential customers will surely fetch you a higher proportion of the profit margin.
- Market Penetration – You get a better understanding of the market if you comprehend your customer profile. You can seamlessly analyze the potential opportunities your business is seeking and the market share your products plan to capture.
In this digital era, customers have the world at their fingertips. The process of investing money in a purchase has changed. Customers now conduct in-depth research on products and services which they are interested in before they make a purchase. Therefore, overlooking the value of customer intelligence or basing decisions on gut without any research and knowledge could be a mistake.
Customer profiling, when merged with services like data segmentation becomes a powerful tool for marketers in this customer-centric age. It gives a comprehensive insight that significantly improves business strategy and decisions. Having said that, you must utilize customer profiling services and start treating your customers and prospects as valued individuals.