3 Super Simple Ideas to Get to Know Your Customers Better October 6, 2021 3 Super Simple Ideas to Get to Know Your Customers Better October 6, 2021 You’re right to want to get to know your customers better. Customer knowledge is key to marketing performance. By getting to know your customers, what they like,...
3 Super Simple Ideas to Get to Know Your Customers Better
October 6, 2021
3 Super Simple Ideas to Get to Know Your Customers Better
October 6, 2021
You’re right to want to get to know your customers better. Customer knowledge is key to marketing performance. By getting to know your customers, what they like, their expectations and their needs, you can better target your products or services and personalise your messages.
Are you looking for ideas on how to achieve your customer knowledge objective? If so, you are probably wondering, how can I develop my customer knowledge? How can I better qualify my target audience and existing clientele?
Read on for three simple and effective ideas to build or optimise your strategy.
1 — Analyse your Market and Target Audience
As a company, you’re no doubt looking to position yourself on a market and gain maximum market share. Your products and services are aimed at a market made up of individuals (B2C) or companies (B2B). These individuals or companies are your potential customers.
One thing is certain: you must have a very detailed knowledge of the market in which you operate. This is key. If you are setting up a company, then you need to acquire this knowledge before getting your business off the ground. If you are a well-established company, then you need to keep up to date with market developments and trends.
A Tool to Analyse Your Market: Market Research
Market research is a classic tool to understand a company’s target market. This tool is not just for new companies. Market research is useful at any stage in the life of a business.
Market research is a good way to get to know your customers better, learn about new trends and be aware of changes in consumer habits.
Market research can take on different forms. In the past, it was carried out by external institutions. They would analyse the available statistics and interview consumer panels to produce a summary document of the market, both from the point of view of supply and demand. But times have changed and there are now lots more options available.
Alternatives to Classic Market Research
The internet has made information easy to access. Companies with limited budgets can study the market themselves, by reading existing studies by Xerfi or Euroostaf, for example. INSEE also publishes interesting information about different industries. Not to mention the general and specialised press, which regularly publish various studies.
Another alternative is to make up a consumer panel yourself and speak to your target customers. There are various ways to do this. You can use a solution like Skeepers CX Management to send surveys to target customers.
2 — Analyse Your CRM Customer Data
Customer knowledge generally refers to your existing customers. Which makes sense. The most important thing is to get to know your own customers better, not the general consumer.
To get to know your customers better, you need to analyse the data you already have. Customer knowledge is nothing more than all of your customer data. Where is your customer data stored? That’s the key question!
Customer Knowledge Requires Centralised Customer Data
There are basically two kinds of companies:
- Those that centralise all their customer data in a master database: usually CRM software, or an alternative technology serving as a customer repository: a Data Warehouse, a Customer Data Platform, etc.
- Those that have customer data spread over various tools and databases.
If the second case applies to you, the main challenge is bringing all your customer data together in a centralised database. Data unification is a prerequisite for customer knowledge.
The Three Main Categories of Customer Data
If the first case applies to you, you need to take the time to analyse your existing data. You can learn a lot about your customers by analysing the data stored in your base. If your database (e.g., your CRM) is sufficiently complete, you’ll be able to find out:
- Socio-demographic data about your customers (sex, age, socio-professional group, location, revenues, etc.). This data will enable you to identify who your customers are.
- Your customers’ interests, their values, passions, preferences… This is referred to as “psychographic” data. This data provides you with information about what your customers like and think.
- Behavioural data, i.e. all the data that provides information about your customers’ behaviour on different channels (web behaviour, email behaviour, etc.) and their reaction to your solicitations. This category of data plays an increasingly important role in marketing.
3 — Enrich Your Customer Knowledge with Surveys
Your database doesn’t have all the data you need to fully understand your customers, their expectations and their needs. You can only access data that you’ve collected or extracted in your CRM. You need to enrich your data.
The Best Tool to Enrich Customer Data? Surveys
To finetune your customer knowledge, you need to enrich your CRM data. There are several tools and techniques for enriching customer data. We’d like to present one of these tools. You’ve probably already heard of it… Customer surveys.
Do you want to better understand your customers’ motivations, needs and preferences to send them more targeted offers? Why not ask your customers to give you the information you need to improve their experience with your brand?
Two Survey Categories to Enrich Your Customer Knowledge
There are several types of surveys, which can be grouped into two main categories:
- Satisfaction surveys sent to customers to measure their overall satisfaction levels or with specific items following an interaction: an online or in-store purchase, a product delivery, contact with customer services, etc. Satisfaction surveys enable you to assess your customers’ experience, but you can add one or two customer knowledge questions too.
- Surveys that could be called “customer knowledge” or “qualification” surveys that serve to collect additional information about your customers. These surveys tend to be titled, “Let’s get to know each other better” or “Tell us more about you”, for example. Marketing quiz surveys also belong to this category.
Targeted Surveys to Deploy on all Your Channels
Modern customer knowledge surveys allow to edit and deploy surveys on the channel(s) of your choice: email, website, mobiles, social media, etc.
You can target your surveys, meaning:
- The customers you want to send your survey to.
- The conditions for triggering the survey. For example, you could trigger the survey according to a customer’s behaviour on a website: pages visited, duration of browsing session, mouse movements, etc.
Integrating Survey Data into your CRM Tool
Skeepers also enables you to analyse the answers collected via your surveys with a custom dashboard interface. But the challenge is ultimately to synchronise this data in your customer database, Customer Relationship Management software, and marketing and customer service tools. Which is why we have developed numerous connectors with the main CRM – CDP solutions on the market.
Let’s recap. Here are the 3 best ways to implement an effective customer knowledge strategy:
- Idea 1: Get to know your target market and customer base.
- Idea 2 : Analyse your customer database (in your CRM) to transform this data into actionable data for your marketing and customer relations operations.
- Idea 3: Enrich your customer database by deploying satisfaction and qualification surveys to your existing customers at key moments of their customer journey.