The Internet is a dog-eat-dog world, and if you don’t optimize your sales funnel in a way that makes your prospective customer feel seen and special, you can kiss that click goodbye.
Personalized and targeted content is the key to drawing in your customers. This creates trust and speaks directly to their conflict. All customers have a conflict: a missing item, a missing service, or a missing experience.
Gather as much data as possible, either passively or ‘earned.’ This may seem invasive, but it’s the nature of the Internet, and we aren’t going to abuse it—we’re going to use it to help them.
There Are 4 Types of Customer Data
You should be seeking 4 types of data:
Basic Personal Info
- name
- birthday/age
- phone number/email
- credit details
- city
- religion
- ethnicity
- kids (#, gender, age)
- gender
- sex
- salary
- marital status & anniversary
- sexual orientation
- interests
- insecurities (aging, acne, hair loss, etc.)
- convictions/political stance
- diet (vegan, gluten-free, etc.)
- lifestyle (active, introverted, outdoorsy, etc.).
This becomes the basis of the customer profile/database.
Interaction/Engagement
- website visits
- social media shares
- click rates
- preferred platform
- browsing duration
- email open rate
- phraseology response (subject lines, keywords, etc.)
- online frequency.
This is usually recorded passively.
Behavioural Data
- product usage habits
- average order value
- cart abandonment
- customer lifetime value
- Internet habits (what time/days most active, what they buy/search for, percentage of shopping that’s done online, etc.).
This helps identify the high-value customers to target.
Attitudinal data
- likes & dislikes/emotions & perceptions about your brand and their navigational experience.
This lets you identify what they want changed.
Strategies to Optimize Your Customer Data
Okay, so now that you have customer data—how do you use it?
Leveraging data to improve customer engagement, brand awareness, and ROI comes down to customizing informational content, products, UI, and marketing to appeal to your high-value customers based on their stats and feedback.
Readable Content
Customers want content that informs them about a solution to their problem. If you know that a portion of your customers/readers share a specific quality, speak to that.
Blogs
If a large demographic is Jewish, make a holiday blog linking great Hanukkah gift ideas. If you sell orthopedic shoes, write about the benefits of custom shoes for servers since a large demographic of people experiencing foot issues are servers. Create both very specific content and wider content, all of it strategically targeting and drawing in your desired customer base.
Studies find that 99% of consumers prefer that brands use emails to reach out.
You can sometimes send out customized emails just for an individual client. This may sound tedious, but if your blanket emails are automated, you’ll have the time/energy to personalize a message. Send relevant content containing:
- news
- new items
- promos
- milestone messages and congratulations (birthdays, anniversaries)
- reminders (abandoned cart items, time to re-up on their recurring purchases like contact lenses/vitamins, sales starting/ending catered to them).
Personalize these emails by using their name in the heading and making a friendly subject line so that your customers know the message is exclusively for them. Schedule it to send at a time/on a day they’re most often checking emails, filling its content with items they like to buy or that fit their interests/insecurities.
You can segment email lists based on any commonality you like.
Solutions
You can use data to tweak products/services/experiences for your customers or to tweak the customers/conflicts you’re reaching with a set solution. Use interactive/attitudinal data to pinpoint where the flow of your website/app is losing people. Improving the esthetics, ease, and clarity of the user interface and onboarding process will help funnel them to a sales point.
Future Investment
Use analytics to make predictions based on patterns, adjusting marketing strategies to become more efficient. Making ads and social posts targeted more accurately to your desired demographic will help attract more high-value customers.
How Do You Get Customer Data?
Customer data can be gathered through:
- web analytics
- giveaways
- social media
- surveys
- reviews
- traded info: you give value in exchange for personal info/subscription (free pdf, promo code, the convenience of online tools like Linkeo’s Deliver. This game-changing online business solution offers value-added features like Click & Collect, plus QR codes and table reservations for restaurants.
First-party data is invaluable.
Why Trade?
Offering something in return for personal information breeds trust and solidifies authority on the subject. Linkeo uses tools like Deliver to gather and sort data while giving the user something useful.
With Deliver, users sign up and enjoy the convenience of reserving tables and ordering food for pickup or delivery. They can also use a QR code to access the menu and make their selection directly from their smartphones. Staff can then focus energy on perfecting orders.
A relationship is give and take. Check out Linkeo, the masters of value, offering proven digital solutions that will incentivize data surrender and improve everyone’s day.
