If you own or manage a business in New Zealand and are interested in creating an effective marketing strategy, improving the relationship between your sales team and your customers, and maximising the capabilities of your support services, collecting a customer database could be your golden ticket to achieving all of these goals.
Simply recording a few details about the people that buy your goods or services will allow you to:
Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Fortunately, once you know how to collect your customer data and exactly how to leverage it, you'll begin to see results quickly.
Here's your guide to get started on collecting your own customer database.
The type of data you need to collect from your customers will differ from business to business and should be relevant to what you're planning on doing with the data. Ideally you'll aim to find the fine line between asking the right amount of questions about your customers so they're not irritated or reluctant to share information, and finding out as much as possible about your customers so that you can tailor your sales, marketing, and services accordingly.
Typically if you're surveying your customers with the aim of discovering who they are, you'll want to collect Personal Data:
For sales and marketing data that you're aiming to put into your CRM and develop strategies from, you might want to collect more complete data:
If your goal is to develop your products or services based on customer data insights, the data you collect might need to shift to Engagement, Behavioural and Attitudinal Data:
Its important to note that your customers may not want to submit a full scale of their personal information and that's okay! It's all about finding the line between what you need to know for a purpose, and what your customers are willing to share. If you're not sure where that line is, run a series of tests to see which set of questions perform best.
Once you've defined what kind of data you want to collect, it's time to establish how you're going to collect and organise that data from your customers. There are a few tried and tested techniques.
Particularly if you're a business that has a shopfront where you're connecting with customers daily, a great place to start is by requesting information of your customers when they're with you. This could be through filling out a survey or review in exchange for an incentive, or simply by recording their name and email to sign up for a deal or loyalty programme.
The most commonly used way to collect data by marketers is through online forms (embedded on websites, landing pages, blogs, emails and social media) that are linked back to a selected CRM or marketing software.
When creating an online form, you can enter just about any field you can imagine - but it's best practice to consider where your customer is at on their buyers journey and ask only relevant questions. For instance, longer forms will be ineffective early in your engagement. Make sure to provide appropriate rewards/incentives when your customers provide their data.
If your business has social media accounts (particularly Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram) you're in the perfect position to begin learning from the type of engagements you're receiving from your audience. Social networks are a proven source of information for your database.
Besides analysing the profiles of your followers and gauging who your audience is, you can look into the impact of each post, reviewing shares, likes and comments, and gain an idea of sentiment and brand perception.
Once you've completed step one (defining what kind of data you're going to collect) as well as step two (how you're going to collect the required information), you're ready to create a strategy on how to leverage the customer details you've collected. Here are three of the best ways we've observed customer data used.
Once you have your customer's details and, in particular, their email address, you have all the tools you need to begin marketing to your database. As a marketer or a business owner embarking on their first database marketing journey, you're in a position to connect with your customers on a personalised level with the right messaging at the right time and measure the results.
To market to your database of customer details you can:
Of course, this is only scratching the surfaces of what you can achieve with your digital marketing. For more information on exactly how to execute this, checkout our blog: Kick Off Your Online Marketing: 5 Steps for Small Businesses
Thanks to the information you've collected on your customers, your sales team will have a greater insight into who they're talking to and where the customer is in the buyers' journey - before they even send an email or pick up a phone. Combining data insights with sales is a sure-fire way to amplify your sales activity and generate ROI effectively.
To integrate your customer data with your sales team, you can:
For more information on using customer data to boost your sales, check out our blog: 5 Buyer Behaviour Secrets to Grow Sales.
If you're a small business you probably already know that a lot of your brand perception and reputation comes down to how your employees handle support services and look after your customers' needs. In fact, every year U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service. The great news is, by keeping a customer database and collecting data, you can significantly improve how you identify and handle your customers' pain-points.
For example:
For more information on how you can modify your business to contend with the modern state of play for payments, download our FREE 21st Century Merchant Survival Guide. We've compiled all the top tips for making sure your payment solution meets the modern consumers expectations.