Who Are Your Best Customers?

Customer profiling is all about getting to know your customers and the similarities between them.

With a good customer profile, you can market to them at the right time, with the right products or services. But just who are your best customers?

Many companies say that they know who their customers are and they market to them accordingly. When pushed, they can rarely give a full profile of their customers and when pushed further still, they will often admit they have no way of monitoring who their best and worst customers are, other than by the amount they spend.

How do you know who your best customers are? How do you know who your worst customers are?

What Type of Profile

There are many different types of profile for customers that you can break down in many different ways.

Your best customers may be small manufacturing companies local to you, or they could be retailers with multiple stores across the UK. So knowing who your ideal customers are and what their needs and wants are is important to marketing to them, giving them exclusive special offers and keeping them loyal to you in an increasingly fickle market. Remember the competition is only a few clicks away.

How to Build a Profile

Ok so you have a need to know who your best and worst customers are but how do you do it?

One way is through market research telephone call. As long as this is done in the right way it can be a great way of gaining information and understanding your customer more personally.

You can also send a questionnaire with the offer of a free gift or exclusive offer to your most frequent and loyal customers to see what the similarities are..

Electronic profiling is where with the info you can then build the profile of your ideal customer. Who they are, what they do and what they like to do.

Understand Customer Behaviour

Next you need to understand their behaviour. What causes them to buy? What drives that buying decision? What they are looking for?

By understanding what they are looking for or might be looking for means that you can advertise online, make a telephone call or send an email at the right times promoting an offer that meets their needs.

Tracking Customers and Making Exclusive Offers

If you know your customers’ behaviour and profile you can use this to market to their needs and guide them to a buying decision.

Target what they see and direct them where to go all the way to the buying stage.

Even if they leave without buying, you know they were there and interested in a certain product or service, and you can use this information to send them a targeted, timely offer on that product with a special time constrained call to action, such as buy within the next hour to get this exclusive offer.