Creating a database of clients is essential to achieve deeper customer understanding. Exploiting the collected data helps to better target the company’s actions and optimize its results.
Among other things, good management of customer data enables generation of sales leads, client retention, increasing sales, and increasing client engagement.
What is customer data management ?
Customer database management consists in acquiring, sorting, organizing and analyzing information collected from the clients of a given company. This data can include the client’s details, their purchasing habits, and demographic information.
Each time the company interacts with a prospective client, it has the possibility of collecting information that, over a length of time, would allow it to build a database of customer information.
Its analysis helps improve buyer understanding and makes the company marketing and communication campaigns easier to target.
Why hold a client database ?
Better understanding of clients, their needs, their expectations, having a better overall vision of the clientele is crucial in optimizing the effectiveness of measures. The analysis of collected data allows companies to segment their clientele and take a targeted and personalized marketing approach.
Thus, the management of a customer database enables companies stand out from the competition and improve client satisfaction. The benefits for the company are numerous. Proper exploitation of the collected data allows for:
- Customer retention;
- Improving the management of customer relations;
- Generating sale leads;
- Increasing sales and revenues;
- Increasing client engagement;
- Understanding trends.
Better targeted, actions like marketing campaigns are more effective as a result. The company budget is thus better utilized to improve its ROI. This solution costs so little to set up that it can help companies make real savings.
How to set up a customer database ?
- Define the relevant information to be collected based on the business segment of the client is an essential phase of the management of customer databases.
- Next, you need to determine where this information can be found and later collected.
- A company can also encourage clients to share this information themselves.
What information to gather ?
Every piece of information isn’t worth collecting. They need to serve the company’s objectives and avoid complicating the understanding of the data.
They can be grouped into 4 categories :
- Personal information: name, address, telephone number, email address, contact preferences…
- Order history: products or services purchased, average basket, frequency of purchases…
- Demographic data: age, date of birth, gender, home address, hobbies and interests, socio-professional category…
- Customer feedback: satisfaction survey, after-sales service, Net Promoter Score…
If a company wishes to offer marketing solutions based on age-group or home location, it will need to concentrate its data-collecting efforts on those factors.
How to obtain information to build a customer database ?
Prospective clients share data each time they interact with the company. When they subscribe to a newsletter, when they make an order, or contact the after-sales service, or even when they ask a question on social media, they reveal an abundance of information that may be of interest to companies. Most notably, we think of contact details and preferences, the difficulties encountered when trying to pass an order for in products or services the may interest the potential client.
In order to sort through the data gathered, one must refer to what the company has decided consider relevant or not to its activity.
How to convince clients to share their information ?
A number of actions can enable the collection of information directly from prospective clients.
- Setting up a game contest is a great way to obtain contact information. However, to target the right people – in other words, those that are truly interested in the company and not just those interested in the prize – it is important to offer a reward that is in line with the company’s products or services. As a consequence, the participants will become potential clients whose contact information will be of use.
- After a purchase, a satisfaction survey is a staple. The questionnaire enables the attribution of a Net Promoter Score or satisfaction score. Later, the company can filter out the critical clients, the passive ones, and the cheerleaders.
Regardless of the method used to build a customer database, it must always be in conformity with GDPR, relative to data protection in Europe.
How to organize and store the collected data ?
To understand client behaviour, anticipate or influence their actions, the proper management of data is essential. It starts by consolidating the gathered information in one tool.
In-house solutions
Creating an in-house file on an Excel spreadsheet can be a good option to get started, but storing all your data can end being complicated as the amount of information grows.The functionalities of this type of tool remain very limited when the time comes to start analyzing and exploiting the data. Collecting data is only useful insofar as you can organize it, interpret it clearly, and later use it fully.
From storage to analysis of customer databases : all-in-one solutions
Numerous customer database management solutions are available on the market today. At Dialog Insight, we propose a tool that allows you to go beyond simply storing, updating and filtering client information.
We facilitate the analysis of the client itinerary in order to detect business opportunities. You can manage and acquire client data to plan or adjust your marketing strategy based on the information, and strike hard and accurately. There are a number of ways to exploit customer data. For example, this information can help you steer an emailing or SMS campaign, by segmenting your database by age, purchase habits, geographical sector, or the hobbies of the customers. This personalized approach will help you target your offer and your message, and improve the effectiveness of your actions and boost your ROI.
A fuller understanding of the client will even help you better anticipate the future needs of prospective clients, enabling you to enhance your products and services.
The creation of a customer database is therefore an unmissable opportunity to optimize the performances and results of a company. Easy to deploy and low-cost, it enables profits in the short and long term. It would be a shame to not take advantage of it.
