How well do you really know your customers?

As Sales and Marketing professionals, we like to think we know our customers pretty well. After all, we spend much of our day either speaking to them directly on the phone, or communicating with them by email, or by using social and other media, but...

Could you genuinely answer all of these questions with confidence?

• What does your typical customer look like?
• How do your customers vary, according to the product or service you supply them?
• Which sectors do you penetrate with the greatest success?
• Who is most likely to be receptive to your business?
• What additional products or services are your customers most likely to be interested in?

You may be able to answer some of these, but very few of us can say we know all of the answers for sure – and of course some of the answers may be dependent on our different products and services and are likely to change over time.

Or we might believe that we know all of the answers to the questions, but then can often be surprised by the results when really analyzing our customers in some detail.

Scoring system

Your data solutions supplier should be able to create a propensity scoring system by analysing your existing customer base. This could also be carried out in segments, by extracting customers that have purchased specific products and building separate propensity scores for each product category.

From here you can analyse your database to obtain relevant insights, and can easily identify the audience most likely to respond to your future direct marketing campaigns. This will help increase ROI when focusing on new business acquisition.

Know more, target better

You can identify which criteria means a prospect is most likely to be interested in your product or service, based on your existing customer knowledge i.e:

• Best sectors, company size, regions, contact types and more for B2B prospects
• Best income bands, regions, hobbies and interests, ages, social classes and more for B2C prospects

That improved knowledge of your customers can also inform you of where your best cross-selling opportunities are with existing customers.

Smarter marketing = improved outcomes

Ultimately, the more customer knowledge you derive from your data, the better you can identify prospects and target those with the highest propensity to convert to a customer, thus reducing communication costs and improving response rates, and thereby maximising the efficiency of your marketing campaigns.