How to Truly Know Your Customers

In order to make the most out of your marketing campaigns, you must know your small business’s customers. According to a study, 80% of brands lack the customer information they need to maximize their marketing efforts. Thus, they are unable to engage in personalized marketing strategies that aid in extreme growth in customer relationships. Before you can optimize your company’s productivity, you must first build strong relationships with your customers, and that comes from knowing your customers. The following are tips on how to really get to know your customers.

1. Examine Purchase History. Review your customers’ past purchases. Any themes? Any repeat orders? Or were they one-time shoppers? You can learn a lot about someone by looking at what they buy. By knowing what they are most likely to buy, you can then tailor your promotions and deals to apply to them personally.

2. Determine Where They’re Coming From. Understand where your customers are coming from. What are their demographic locations? What is their approximate age range? Determine if there are other, dominant competitors in the area that you will need to be wary of, and what would be likely to cause the customers to migrate elsewhere.

3. Stay In Tune with the Times. Just because something worked in the past does not mean that it will work as well in the future. You need to keep reviewing your strategies to make sure that are in line with what your customers are showing you at the present time. Make sure that any data you are using to conduct your evaluations is as current as it can be.

4. Identify Customer Triggers. More than half of all marketers rely on request-based triggers, and most tend to completely ignore life events in the lives of customers. Try to determine who your most important customers are, as well as when they are most likely to spend. You may also want to note their threshold triggers, too, meaning how much they are willing to spend. This will help you know when the best time to advertise to them, as well as the price range of the items you will be promoting to them.

5. Use Interaction Data. It has been determined that seven out of ten marketers ignore social data. There are numerous tools available to better understand your customers on their social networks, one example being Facebook analytics. You can learn a lot about your consumers’ necessities through their comments and posts on their social media channels. Also, customers are normally more than willing to offer information if given appropriate incentives. Loyalty cards and surveys are great and easy ways to interact with and learn more about your customers.

If you want your marketing efforts to be successful, you must know who you are marketing to. Take the time to get to know your customers and increase their likelihood of purchasing your products.