Creating The Perfect Customer Profile

* Just because you have access to real-time data on things like clicks and opens that does not mean that you can neglect your customer profile.

* To create a customer profile you need 3 different dimensions of customer data Behavioral, Demographic, and Attitudinal.

* Customer profiles will change over time, this change can be driven by some kind of internal factor like changing your price point or it can change because of some kind of external factor.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 29 of the Inevitable Success Podcast.

Transcript:

Damian: So here we are back at BuyerGenomics Headquarters in New York City. And actually, we’re going to talk about an interesting topic today. But, we had a new addition to our marketing team this week. We have Luna, which is our head developer’s puppy, running around. So I thought that was pretty cool, never had a –

Stephen: Company dog?

Damian: A company dog.

Stephen: It’s a morale booster for sure.

Damian: Yeah definitely. So anyway we’re going to talk today about probably the most important thing to every business, which is knowing their customer. Because if you know the customer, then you can really be an effective marketer – you know who you want to speak to, how to speak to them. What is the best method that you have to know the customer?

Stephen: Well you’ve got to look at the data. So let’s go back a little bit. Looking at the data is what we call analytics right? So you refer to about what, eight episodes ago, remember we talked about different types of analytics?

Damian: Yup.

Stephen: We talked about dashboard BI reporting – that’s about hey, what’s going on, I dropped this thing and what happened to me. It’s all about companies right saying, “How am I doing?” – that type of thing. What was the second one? The second one was descriptive analytics. What is that? That’s about the customers now. The third one being predictive analytics, the fourth one being optimization. Let’s go back to the real basics of descriptive analytics – that is okay, so I know who’s been clicking, who’s buying, and all that – great. And so you see all these reports coming in, what are the clicks we’re able to open, great, you know all these things. But that doesn’t mean that you know who’s behind those clicks. Are they old, are they rich, are they being a good customer, high-value customer, or what are they? So digging deeper into who they are, is the beginning of the customer profile. I’m sure you’ve heard this word many times.

Damian: Customer profile.

Stephen: Exactly, the customer profile is an age-old thing. It’s not anything new. And why is it important now? Because a lot of people are neglecting to do it. We rely so much on the real-time data of, “Oh yeah I dropped this email, I did x, y, z clickthrough rates, I’m doing fine.” That is very important. That does not negate the need to understand how the customer looks like.

Damian: Right. I’m sure you’re going to get to it. But, I’ll ask you directly – what are the different ways to profile a customer, or what would you say encompasses a customer profile?

Stephen: So and also we talked about seven episodes ago, we talked about the dimensions of data that you have to look at and we talked about three different dimensions. Let’s remind ourselves –

Damian: I think what you’re saying is you have to listen to every single episode.

Stephen: No,