5 Easy Steps for Building a Customer Database

data

Customers are undoubtedly the biggest source of information for any business. The more customer-centric a business is, the better its chances of gaining profits. Whenever customers interact with your business or purchase from it, you gain some data based on their behaviour and buying patterns.

All these data can be useful in making decisions for your business that can potentially increase the sales and revenue for your business. The information is known as a customer database. Many new businesses struggle to create an efficient customer database. Here are 5 simple steps for building a customer database.

Determining the Needs

Every business is different, and based on their requirements, the purpose of customer data management varies. There are quite a few reasons your business might need customer data, and determining them is the first step of the customer data management process.

The primary reason for collecting customer data is to increase the revenue and sales of a business. It is expected that properly retained and utilized customer data can increase revenue and sales by as much as 40%.

Customer data can also help reduce lead costs and help nurture them. The data can also improve customer retention by letting the business create valuable relationships with their customers. This also leads to increased ROI obtained from each retained customer and ensures an overall lifetime increase in revenue.

Choosing the Type of Data

Based on your business, you will need to collect different types of data from your customers. But some basic types apply to most businesses. You could collect the basic contact information of your customers which can contain their name, email address, and one contact information (address or phone number). You can also ask them where they heard about your business to trace back the medium of communication and make it better for the next campaign.

Another type of data can be demographic details of the customers (gender, age, birthday, income, educational background, and hobbies). You can also collect buyer purchase behaviour data which contains how many items they have purchased from you and at what time, what is their preferred mode of payment, and how much their lifetime purchase value is.

Collecting the Data

After you have determined the type of data you want, you have to collect it. There are various ways of collecting data for your business. The most common form of collecting data would be your website. Customers enter their personal information when they sign up on your website. You can simply track their accounts and find their purchase history, how long they spend on each page, what products they are interested in, and which ones they are buying. Their accounts can also give you an idea of how much they have spent on your brand overall.

If you want additional data, you can conduct a small survey or ask a question to your customers through a popup window. These surveys can also be conducted through social media platforms.

Storing the Data

After you have collected the data, you will need to store it for future usage. The best way to store customer data is to use a cloud-based system. When your business is relatively small, taking a manual approach to store customer data would be cost-efficient. Always remember to store the data on a cloud server.

However, as your business grows, you will obtain more complex customer information, and it might be impossible for you to track and process them manually. This is when you need software that can not only store large volumes of data but can also process it and provide meaningful insight.  There is various CRM or Customer Relationship Management software where you can easily store the data.

Processing the Data

There are various CDP that you can use to process the data and make them eligible for future use. If you have collected data from both online and offline channels, creating a coherent report by merging them can be a daunting and time-consuming process. This is where the customer data platforms come into play. They come with visual drag and drop analytics which provides customer intelligence. They also provide support for creating marketing campaigns for unlimited channels by collecting data from all sources.

These platforms come with individual customer views where you can get all information about one customer in one place, including their data and purchase behaviour.

The data then can be turned into analytics so that you can use that information to create better-targeted marketing campaigns for your products or services.

Customer data is an invaluable asset for any business. While obtaining them might seem like the hardest part of the process, processing them to find insights is perhaps the actual hardest task of the bunch. With the right customer data platform, you can easily sort and store your customer data and pull insights from them whenever you need them.