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Capturing Customer Data

We’ve already established the value that a robust eCRM program can have for maximising your customer relationships, so now we move on to the specifics of how you go about setting one up.

Your ability to speak to your customer and address their specific needs starts and ends with the quantity and quality of information you hold about your customer. The more high quality data you have, the better you can anticipate and address their buying needs.

So where does this information come from?

There are a multiplicity of data sources available to you, the eMarketer - the question becomes what data should you capture and use to engage with your clients and where do you get it from?

What?
Let’s start with what data you should be looking to collect.

This is really one of those ‘how long is a piece of string’ questions. The more data you can gather about your customer, the better you can understand them. But you walk a fine line. If you ask too much from the customer too soon, you risk them closing the door to you. If you ask too little, then you don’t have sufficient data to be able to fully understand their buying patterns.

The key is to be strategic in what you ask for. Don’t ask for any information that you don’t have need for. Also, prioritise the information you request so you can capture the key demographic information up front and fill in details over time as your customer trusts you.

Skeleton Information
Your basic customer data might include:

• email address
• first name
• last name
• postcode
• age
• marital status
• income
• gender
• mobile phone number
• permission (you want to capture their permission to allow you to contact them via email/text in order to avoid spamming)

Even with only some of this information, you can begin to construct a comprehensive picture of your customer.

How?
How do you get your customer to give you this information? You could offer them a newsletter to subscribe to, send them a catalogue or run a contest. Sometimes you tease the information out of them with games, quizzes or vouchers.

Once you’ve obtained basic information on your customer, you can flesh out their profile through further customer interaction with your brand.

The other way you can go about this is through email appending where you take an email list to a data warehouse to purchase data to further flesh out your list.

Where?
Now that you understand what sort of information you want, you need to figure out where you are going to capture it. There are several options available for capturing basic data and developing it over time.

POS
When your customer is face to face with one of your sales associates is a perfect time to try and capture information from them. Point of sales contact can be a time to gather email addresses or to encourage your customer to sign up to your loyalty card scheme. Be aware of human error which can creep in when data is captured manually.

Loyalty Cards
Many of the supermarket chains have achieved great success with loyalty card schemes. By signing up to the scheme, your customer collects points from their purchases which they can redeem for future savings or rewards. From your point of view, if you get them using their loyalty card you can track their purchases. This allows you to build up a comprehensive profile of what your customer buys.

Do they buy nappies every week? It’s a pretty good assumption that they have a baby at home and might be interested in vouchers for baby shampoo, etc.

You may have to use profiling to determine if, for instance, a husband and wife are both sharing the same card which could skew your data. With profiling, you might create sub-profiles within a main profile.

Call Centre
Your call-centre staff are able to further expand on your customer’s profile. A few simple questions can confirm address details or fill in missing data from an incomplete profile. They can also ask the customer to partake in a brief survey or offer a subscription to a newsletter or catalogue.

Social Media
You can capture plenty of customer data utilising Social Media. Facebook Connect, which saves your customer the trouble of filling out your form by populating it with their Facebook information, also gives you permission to access much of their Facebook data which you can import to your own database.

Website
Web Analytics allow marketers to track your customer’s browsing habits. If your customer signs into your site, or if you have a cookie tracing their activities on their computer, you can gather data based on what areas of your website they look at or any items they put into their shopping cart. Logging how web traffic arrives at your site is another valuable web tool. Tracking banner ad response, Google AdWords campaigns, and use of companion sites are also frequently utilised by eMarketers.

Email
Email allows you to send sales messages directly to your customer. Open rates are one way of roughly determining the effectiveness of your campaign; however click-through rates are an even better barometer of your customer’s interest. Again, all of this is useful data which is added to your customer profile.

SMS/Text
SMS/Text messaging, while a useful tool to connect with your customer, is best used in conjunction with another tool such as email. You can only track bounce rates and click through rates, so it isn’t the most accurate measurement of customer engagement.

ERP
As you collect all this customer information, you feed it into your ERP system. The ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system) is your database or repository for all your customer data.

Next Month
We’ve kicked off our exploration of eCRM by looking at some of the customer data you should be aiming to collect and the primary sources you can gather it from.

Next month, we’ll look at how to create a flexible database which will be the engine driving your eCRM activities.