Building trust and strong relationships with customers isone of the single biggest factors in driving loyalty and therefore improvingthe value of your customer relationships. Yet good customer data is one of thebiggest barriers for achieving these personalised communications. No surprise therefore that in recent polls, personalisationis measurably the single biggest concern for marketers.

So we thought it was about time to do a quick run down ofthe ways that you can collect or enhance your customer data in order to createmore insight and develop more personalised experiences.  If you want to find out how you we have used this technique to build a simple segmentation to improve customer experience then check out this case study for Matalan on creating greater customer relevance.

The first thing we have to look at are the types of data that are useful to your customer experience and this basically breaks down into 2 types:

Anonymous – where you have a digital footprint of an individual– but no specific personal data such as name or address. An awful lot of engagement is via digitalchannels, which use this anonymised data to personalise the customer experience,even though it cannot be tagged back to an individual on your database. With the surge in digital capabilities duringCovid – this now has to be one of the fastest growing areas of personalisation.

Personal – where you have a name and either anemail or address of an individual. Theseare the people who are already on your database and in your sales funnel as unconvertedleads or existing customers, you should know the most about these customers andyet this tends to be the least populated data set, beyond transactional data.

Both types of datawill allow you to target and improve the user experience, using this rich seam ofdata available from your eco-system.

You may have been able to join the dotsbetween the anonymous and personal profiles enabling you to recognise andcontrol the user experience across channels. But you don’t have to rely on integratedsystems to help form a better understanding of your customers. You can build profiles in a more organic way,by making every interaction count.

Clearly, youhave to develop a systematic approach to data building, establishing what datais useful and understanding how you will use it to improve your relationship throughpersonalised marketing. But as long asyou have this in place, the following can be used to build your knowledge asyou go…

1) Online Tracking

Your business’ website, and your app if you have one, are excellenttools for collecting customer data. When someone visits your website, theycreate upto 40 data points. Accessing this data allows you to see how many peoplevisited your site, how long they were on it, what they clicked on and more.Your website hosting provider may collect this kind of information, or you canalso use analytics software. You can also place pixels on your site, which enableyou to place and read cookies to help track user behaviour.

2) Transactional

Whetheryou sell goods in-store, online or both, your transactional data can give youvaluable insights about your customers and your business. You may storetransactional records in a customer relationship management system. That datamay come from your web store, a third party you contract with for e-commerce oryour in-store point-of-sale system. This information about how many productsyou sell, what types of products are most popular, how often people typicallypurchase from you and more will give you valuable insights into your customerpurchasing behaviour.

3) Online Marketing Analytics

You can also collect valuable data through your marketing campaigns,whether you run them on search, webpages, email or offline campaigns. Thesoftware you use to place your ads or run your email, SMS or push campaigns, willlikely give you data about who clicked, what times they clicked, what devicethey used and more. If you track the performance of offline ads by, forexample, asking customers how they heard about your brand, you can import thatdata into your DMP.

4) Social Media Monitoring

Socialmedia is another excellent source of customer data. You can look through your follower list tosee who follows you and what characteristics they have in common to enhanceyour understanding of who your target audience should be. You can also monitor mentions of your brandon social media by regularly searching your brands name setting up alerts orusing third-party social media monitoring software. Many social platforms provide analytics abouthow your posts perform. Third partytools may be able to offer you even more in-depth insights.

5) Subscription & Registration Data

Offering customers something in return for providing information aboutthemselves can help you gather valuable customer data. You can do this byrequiring some basic information from customers or site visitors who want tosign up for your email list, rewards program or another similar program. Onebenefit of this method is that the leads you get are likely to convert becausethey have actively demonstrated an interest in your brand.

6) In Store Traffic

Youcan setup a network that will allow you to tap into your customers mobiles andtrack them in store (as long as you have their permission to do so). This will providevital insights into the busiest times, high browse and low buy departments etc. If you use a tap in/out system or a mobileapp – you can not only harvest the interest in certain departments or products,but you can push notifications to them to enhance their shoppingexperience. Giving users reasons to tapinto your store with a value exchange can also help you to stitch the mobile profileto their customer data – at which point you can join the in store and database profilestogether, giving more insight and value to your business.

7) Competitions, Polls

Asimple competition or poll can help you to gather new leads, as well as addsome colour to the data that you hold on your customers. As a simple value exchange ie: the chance towin, or take part in something, should return a little more insight. The data gathered should be commensurate withthe value of the prize – so you can only expect to gather a small amount of unintrusivedata such as age, lifestage or product preference.

8) Gamification

Isa great way to engage and entertain customers, but can be an invaluable way tobuild insight about them at a deeper level if you construct the game with dataenrichment in mind. Think about the oldsurveys in the popular lifestyle mags – what kind of personality/cook/atheleteare you? This principle of mainly A’s, B’sor C answers to a few simple questions will give you some insight into who orwhat you are is still a winning formula. Remember that any interesting engagementpiece may have bragging rights – you can reach a wider audience than yourinitial customer. So, include theability to forward or share the results in your mechanic.

9) Surveys

Surveysare one way in which you can directly ask customers for information. You canuse them to collect either quantitative or qualitative data or both. A surveyconsists of a list of questions, requiring just one or two word answers, oreven multiple choice options. You can conduct them online, over email, over thephone or in person. One of the easiest methods is to create an online surveyyou host on your website or with a third party. You can then share a link tothat survey on social media, over email and in pop-ups on your site

10) Preferences (Probablistic or Deterministic)

Youcan setup a preference centre to establish what content, offers or productscustomers might be interested in, but you can also collect the same informationover time by tracking their engagement with your content.    Obviously, you would have to set rules forhow many times they engaged with said content before you marked it as a preference,but it can help you target your content better. This could help you to put your customers into more appropriate communicationstreams, or just prioritise product or offers content within communications.

11) Data Enrichment

Addingexternal data to your customer records will help you to build a better picture ofyour customers or segments, such as affluence, lifestage or interests. This can be used to help you with buildingpen portraits for communications, but unless you are going to buy it at ahousehold level it is modelled data that should be used as indicative only. A far better, but much longer way to buildthis insight is through many of the other techniques listed above.

Don't Forget.....

As a final,but important point. Remember to ensurethat all data collected, is used and has the express knowledge and consent ofthe user for future marketing or analytics purposes, so that you are GDPR compliant.

Finally,this is a value exchange. Sowhen determining the data to be collected, it’s essential to find the rightbalance. Asking for too much candiscourage people from participating, while not asking for enough means yourdata won’t be as useful, or will take longer to build.

Further Reading

If you would like to know more about how to create simple customer personalisation to improve customer ROI then read this blog.