How to build a customer profile that drives engagement

Data. Everything is and has always been driven by data, whether it is to determine what products to order, how to develop award-winning websites and where to locate distribution centres to reduce time to serve costs. The information that has been collected leads all of these decisions to make sure customers are given the best possible experience.

With the digital journey now a key part of every business, it’s possible to tailor the experience for each customer for when they visit your website or sending highly personalised communications and content.

So, how are you able to do this? The answer is by creating a rich, single customer profile.

What is a customer profile?

With the rise of omnichannel shopping and engagement, it is imperative that, for a rich customer profile, consumer behaviour across all of these channels are aggregated in order to build a full picture of the customer and their interactions with your brand. This will allow you to tailor campaigns for the customer and provide personalised support. The ability to personalise the experience for a customer cannot be understated, with consumer expectations increasing 58% since the start of the pandemic and nearly 70% of customers stating that one bad experience will reduce loyalty to that brand.

What sort of data can a customer profile contain?

A common misconception is that all you need to know about a customer is his or her name, email address and address. To succeed today with customers, you need much more insight. It’s why you need a rich customer profile.

A rich customer profile should hold as much information as possible about the customer and their interactions with your company. The most common information that you’ll find in a company profile is the contact information i.e. name, address, email address. There may also be the customer’s date of birth which will allow you to target birthday and age-related information. Then, there is the order information which describes all of the orders and returns that a customer has made. This is more complex than it sounds because nowadays, there are so many separate sales channels, such as websites, physical stores, Amazon marketplaces, Shopify stores to name a few, but it’s worth the effort.

There’s also website analytics which can help you identify a customer’s interests; if a customer is spending a large amount of time in a particular area of your site, you can tailor communications based on his or her online behaviour.

Social media is a major source of data. Using this, you’ll be able to pick up on a customer’s hobbies and interests as well as how they interact with your brand.

How to build a customer profile

With so many different sources of information, how are you going to collate all of the information and turn it into something tangible, something that you can use to make informed decisions on how best to interact with your customers?

Firstly, with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and similar laws in other countries, it is important to be transparent with the customer about the data that you are collecting and to confirm with them that they are happy for you to collect it.

When making decisions on the type of data that you gather you should have in mind how the relevant internal teams will be using the profile; the sales team will need different information to the marketing or support team for example.

It may also become apparent that you’ll need different types of customer profiles. For example, B2B customers may require multiple contacts and addresses and need to store information such as it’s industry whereas a B2C customer would only have a single contact and need information such as date of birth, gender, interests, buying habits.

The benefits of having a rich customer profile

There are countless benefits to having a full customer profile. For a start, it makes it easier to create a truly personalised experience for each customer, whether it be through more targeted marketing or by customising the website so that the customer sees their favourite items when they revisit.

You’ll be able to produce more detailed reports and produce better returns on campaigns. It may even allow you to begin to better predict user engagement and make business decisions based upon this, allowing you to provide goods and services to your customers before they know that they need it.

All of this will help with building and maintaining customer loyalty as users will know that your business is one that they can depend on to fulfil their needs and provide a positive experience.

If you haven’t yet built a rich customer profile, it’s important that you accelerate your efforts if you are to attract and retain customers – the source of your revenue.