3 reasons marketers love customer profiles and how they help brands grow
In modern marketing, you rarely develop a customer loyalty plan or marketing strategy without identifying your customer profiles. Regardless of industry and business model, a customer profile is defined as: A customer profile tells you everything you need to know about the people you want to bring onto your customer list.
Anatomy of a Customer Profile
Not all customer profiles are built the same. Both CRM and Customer Data Platforms build toward consolidating information around the customer. Generally, at VIEWN, we describe, Customer profile information to include common data a business may have from their CRM, POS, and even email campaign apps since customer data platforms are built to connect and analyze information from multiple sources. It may also include more contextual information about the customer, like preferences and survey results.
At a minimum, data within a B2C customer profile can include:
Name
Age
Location
Income Level
Job title
Digital Interactions
Mobile device
Orders
Motivators
Pain points
Contact information
And a B2B profile will also include:
Company
Industry
Organization Size
Additional business interaction data
A B2C customer profile may point to usage information and segmentation by demographics and buyer attitudes while, a B2B customer profile, which is central to solutions for getting that 360-degree views of the customer, includes the firmographic data in a CRM—such as their company size, employee count, or annual turnover.
Customer profiles are often referred to as user profiles or buyer personas. Each term essentially means the same thing: A single document lists key demographics, interests, and behaviors of your target customers.
3 Reasons Why Customer Profiles are a Critical Marketing Tool
Most marketers engaged in using customer data, customer acquisition, and customer retention and loyalty have weighed-in that being able to create, store and leverage universal 360-degree customer profiles is either important or extremely important. And the need for solutions that drive visibility and understanding of the customer has never been greater.
According to Accenture, 33% of consumers who ended their relationship with a company last year did so because the experience wasn’t personalized enough. The threat of not investing in solutions to retain customers is real and very expensive.
Reason 1. Reduce churn
When you put together a customer profile, you’ll know your target customers' characteristics who most likely cancel or stay. At VIEWN, we have outlined pilots to evaluate events that are most likely to make a customer leave from order data, support inquiries, product usage. Marketers can more effectively nature their customers if you understand the experience pitfalls. For example, when analysis of profiles reveals that new customers who take more than 2 weeks to complete onboarding will most likely cancel after 6 months. As such brand marketers and account managers alike, can nature early users through a more seamless onboarding experience to reduce cancellations.
What does your customer data tell you about churn? Is it easy to identify?
Reason 2: Love and loyalty drive retention
It is always cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one, but did you know it can be up to 25x cheaper?
Customer profiles slot in perfectly here because you can use a lead’s interests to personalize the post-purchase customer marketing campaigns you’re sending to them.
So a lead becomes a customer, marketers need to focus straight into a focus on customer retention – keeping existing customers around, encouraging them to become loyal to your brand, and persuading them to purchase time and time again.
Here profiles inform about segment characteristics and preferences and the customer that keeps customers returning. For subscription-based businesses, issues that result in churn can be uncovered by looking at customer experiences that resulted in cancels and focus on improving those.
What does your customer data tell you about customer loyalty? Are loyalty trends visible?
Reason 3: Account-based marketing gets an upgrade
The digital economy is proof that personalization remains at the top of marketers' minds, and that’s where account-based marketing (ABM) steps in to shine. One report found 52% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers or discounts—something you can use customer profiling to take advantage of.
B2Bs rely on an account-based marketing strategy, personalizing the communication your sales team has with each lead. It’s tough to do that on a large scale of thousands of individuals across hundreds of accounts when you don’t have much time to invest in learning about each lead.
But when customer profiles come into the mix, you can focus on the pain points they share, like churn or outdated IT systems.
Have you used customer data to deliver compelling, empathetic ABM? What do the results reveal to do more of the same or improve your targeting?
If you tackled each of these reasons with strong results already in place, please share. However, if you would like these answers from your customer data, help is closer than you think.
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