Charlevoix Books

Customers Profile

Higher quality customer data is important to your business, and there are more sources available for obtaining it than ever before. The result is that you can afford to do a lot of number-crunching before you spend a penny on postage. Those data will affect success rate for your offering mail. You can also weed out the useless names and mail only to your most likely prospects.

There are 6 factors to consider when building customer profiles:

• Affinity profiling – analyzes current buying habits to better match customer to product. Knowing what kinds of product a particular customer is buying gives you the ability to build an “affinity matrix” showing what related products would stimulate more sales from him/her.
• Demographic and psychographic data is also used for profiling. Demographics tells you a client is a 29-year-old, unmarried, male who earns $45,000 and drives a 2-year old Lexus. Psychographic data suggests that single young men who buy status-symbol cars are excellent prospects for other highly visible status products. Combining the two types of data yields a customer profile to someone marketing, say, the latest cellular phone.
• Lifestyle Coding is used to enhance basic demographic information. Simply put – people in certain demographic categories will likely have similar hobbies and other interests.
• Mapping is another useful tool in building customer profiles. Census data, topographic information, geographic coordinates, and zip code+4 postal data can be fed into a computer yielding maps that can be color coded to certain characteristics of consumers in particular neighborhoods.
• Cluster Coding is a popular means of grouping people by lifestyle characteristics. Remember hearing the terms “Urban Up-and-Comers, Settled In, and White Picket Fence” used to describe market segments? These are known as “clusters”, each given a score according to affluence, social position, activities, and aspirations.
• Survey data – can be used to enhance demographic, lifestyle, and other data to build a profile. This is collected directly from your customers via application forms, surveys, and credit histories. This provides a more personal portrait of the customer than merely census or demographic data.

The Direct Marketer of today has become more of a “surgeon” than a “shotgun hunter”. It’s no longer cost-effective to shoot at 400,000 prospects to get 40,000 clients, and with computers it’s easier to slice-and-dice data today