Archive for Customer Profiling
Customer Profiling – Know Thy Target
The ancient Greek aphorism, “Know Thyself,” is keenly relevant to companies courting success.
Just as relevant to your marketing efforts is, “Know Thy Target.” Or, in marketing-speak, customer profiling. What is it about your product or service that really inspires your customers? What do those customers have in common? What motivates them, what makes them tick?
Knowing how to answer these questions can be the difference between talking to your potential customers and interacting with them.
Understanding those you most want to reach
Your company has no doubt built plenty of understanding simply in the course of business. And your anecdotal evidence can speak volumes. Your sales teams are an invaluable resource in building a profile of the ideal potential target and customer.
- How much they earn
- Their level of education
- Where they live
- How many children they have
- What they watch on TV
- What music they enjoy
The list goes on. You can also benefit from data about those who purchase similar products or services.
Once you’ve compiled your list of your target’s defining traits, its’ time to find out just who those people are—and create a marketing list to reach them.
Customer Profiling plus proven experience
Through every step in this entire process, the V12 Group offers extensive experience and industry-leading expertise. We do this by using the factual evidence in our vast customer databases. We can find and precisely target the market you’re looking for – and provide a means to reach them effectively and efficiently. We even offer suggestions for other products or services your ideal target might like to learn about.
It all starts with a comprehensive understanding of your customer. To this end, customer profiling is one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s repertoire.
Contact us to learn more about our how customer profiling with V12 Group will get more prospects into your sales cycle.
Get started customer profiling today with The V12 Group
Our approach to customer profiling targets audiences and segments that are unique in composition of age, income, home ownership, marital status, ethnicity, wealth, behavior, discretionary spending, etc.
In customer profiling, after studying your data, it’s important to use it to find the best prospects in the most robust and fresh database possible. That’s the database at The V12 Group.
Customer Profiling – Powerful Patterns
One of the powerful features of V12 Group’s marketing data is the knowledge that can be gleaned from cluster behaviors. These are common characteristics we identify in smaller segments of your customer files and/or past purchases. Through customer profiling, specific behaviors can be isolated and then used to guide new marketing initiatives which might reward ongoing positive responses or correct customer fall-off. This power to zero in on a specific segment with precisely tailored messaging is a real advantage for your marketing efforts.
Customer Profiling Use Case #1
Customer Profiling 101: Most companies maintain some sort of database in which they list what they know about their current customers. V12 Group will take that data and append it to many other databases like DMV data, home ownership, mortgage equity, income, gender, marital status, number and ages of children, etc.
For example, imagine that in looking at your best customers, we notice they are primarily:
- Age 25 – 35
- Males
- Earning less than $75,000/yr
- Who like to buy from mail order
- Showing an unusually high likelihood to opt in for SMS messages
- Home owners with low equity
- In rural areas within 20 miles of metro areas
- On septic systems
- Truck owners
This kind of customer profiling becomes very powerful when we find a cluster in which consistent data coincides with consistent customer behavior. Are all your customers in this cluster suddenly showing above the norm interest in your latest product launch? Or are they suddenly leaving the franchise in droves? Because they’re a cluster, your direct marketing can speak to them in the same way and get very efficient.
Use the Cluster Data for Outreach: Because you’ve learned the profiling data of your best customers, you can use it to reach new prospects who match. Thus, you’re not wasting marketing money on those who are less likely to buy anyway.
Now it’s time to unleash the power of multi-channel marketing in your campaign. If they are ordering from mail order, you might decide on a mail campaign with a prominent offer. You might want to also send them a text message with a coupon which can be combined with the coupon in the direct mailer.
And these are just media choices. Based on how your product or service offering matches with this data, you might be able to structure a series of offers to segments of this group in a split-list test.
Behavior Mapping for Reactive Marketing
V12 Group can help you interact on an even deeper level over time. If one cluster suddenly changes their behavior after a slight change in your business, or based on seasonality, you can spot the trend and test responses. For instance, you might test price elasticity in this cluster or look for regional preferences, etc.
The Power of Sociological Profiles
Everybody loves looking in a mirror. Good direct marketing is like that; the prospective customer sees themselves – their pain points, their wants, their needs – in the marketing. By grouping your prospects into smaller segments, or clusters, you’ll be able to better target them with empathetic messaging and, thus, offer something of value in their lives.
The Variables and How to Weigh Them
Profiling variables are typically broken down into (1) Demographic, (2) Geographic, (3) Psychographic, and (4) Behavioral.
Some customer profiling experts are beginning to value behavioral data more than the others, stating that it gives you more control in customer retention and service. At the V12 Group, we tend to take a business-by-business approach. Each company and business category faces unique issues in their direct marketing, so we approach each client holistically.
Customer Profiling, Holistically Approached
Imagine you’re a retailer who speaks to customers through multi-channel campaigns. Then imagine you sales data shows a heavy uptick in sales in November (not surprising), followed by a downtick on December 26th. This behavioral data could lead you to invest heavily in promotions in the week before New Years Day, unless you also look at a mix of psychographic and demographic data.
A demographic understanding of the same cluster might show a higher income level. Their psychographic data may show that they like to travel. The same group may show a higher propensity to subscribe to travel magazines.
Now you’ve got some powerful data. As a result, you might decide that the sales downtick on December 26th is the result of vacation travel out of the sales market; and you should hold off any promotions until the second week of January when your prospects are back in town.
Customer Profiling Saves Money and Increases ROI
Contact the V12 Group to learn more about how customer profiling with our robust data can save your company money by greatly increasing your understanding of your very best prospects.
Get started customer profiling with great data today
Are Moms Reading Your Emails?
Great article on MediaPost today regarding email marketing and taking the time to understand specific demographics and their preferences to make your email communications more effective and to keep them coming back for more.
Current statistics show that moms control about $4 billion in annual household spending today, which is obviously why so many marketers are trying so hard to engage them. And it seems that one of the preferred ways to communicate with just about any target segment these days is through email, due mainly to its low cost and high ROI potential.
A recent report from Forrester predicts that emails from marketers to consumers’ primary inboxes will swell to an average 9,000 annually by 2014. But, considering moms’ hectic schedules that keep them running everywhere from the workplace to school activities to soccer practices and dance classes to doctor and dentist appointments, you wonder when these active women have time to check email.
We conducted our own research among more than 400 women with children age 12 and under living in their households, including if and when they read marketing-oriented emails and newsletters. It turns out that even the busiest moms make time to check their email accounts on a regular basis. In fact, here’s what we found:
• Nearly 96% of respondents said they check email at least once a day.
• More than 80% of them actually look forward to checking email.
• Most important, eight in 10 moms indicated they want to receive offers and information from preferred brands via email.
Understand Their Preferences
It’s clear that email is a viable vehicle for engaging moms, but it’s a crowded space, especially when knowing that more than half of these women maintain only one email account. And, with 50% of our respondents indicating that they are most likely to “unsubscribe” either because they don’t find the information useful or interesting, or they’re being inundated with emails, staying relevant is key with regard to both frequency and content. Here are a few findings that might help you with this process:
• Approximately 45% of respondents indicated they prefer to receive email correspondence from any one brand about once a week.
• Nearly 50% of respondents said they tend to read emails with time-sensitive subject lines, such as “50% Off Today Only,” first.
• Nearly 85% of respondents said they wanted to receive coupons, and approximately 78% said they preferred to receive information about sales and promotions.
• Nearly 73% of our moms indicated they might make a special trip to the store after receiving an email containing a coupon or promotion.
• More than 63% said they print coupons for brands they use or want to try so they have it for their next trip to the store.
Even after nearly 20 years of email marketing, the right offer still drives a desired action. To be effective with this channel, consider periodically offering incentives to get subscribers to provide feedback through quick surveys about what they consider to be both relevant content and acceptable frequency. Then tailor your emails to reflect these findings. Look closely at your subject lines and ensure the content speaks to your consumers’ personal interest.
Make It Personal
Speaking of “personal,” more than 60% of moms said they would provide information about themselves to a trusted brand if it meant they would receive more personalized content. Interestingly, seven in 10 of these women said they would even provide certain information about their children if it meant they could get more relevant information and offers from their preferred brands.
These findings illustrate that women have become comfortable providing information about themselves — even about their children — to preferred brands if it means they will get more useful information and offers back. If they’re willing to provide the data, then you need to make sure you have mechanisms in place to collect it. But, be smart about what type of information you ask for and how often you ask for it. And, make sure you then use it. Asking moms what they want and then failing to deliver on it could be worse for your brand than not asking at all.
Relevance Top Business Objective for 2010
Marketing Sherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark reports that relevance is the top business objective for 2010. In order to establish relevance, you need to understand your customers preference and behavior. This in turn allows marketers to develop segment specific creative imagery, messaging and calls to action to ensure the right message goes to the right person. Ultimately ensuring marketing expense is focused on the right target.
V12 Group has significant, relevant experience in developing customer profiles and models that provide insight into customer preference and behavior. This insight can be used to help clients improve the relevance of offers and messaging used.
Our Customer Profiling looks within the client’s customer database to identify the most descriptive traits and segments of their ideal customer which are then used to find prospects that look like them. This information can also be used to understand customers that cancel, default or demonstrate other negative behavior.
Specifically, we use empirical evidence contained in the customer database to:
- Identify traits of buyers who use specific services
- Target audiences/segments that are unique in composition of age, income, home ownership, marital status, ethnicity, wealth, behavior, discretionary spending, etc.
- Identify services that are most appropriately marketed together
For more information about how V12 Group can help you establish relevance, visit our Customer Profiling page, or fill out our contact form and a representative will contact you shortly.