Email and website technology make it easy for marketers to collect valuable profiling information from their customers. This enables them to maximise the effectiveness of their direct marketing by sending highly targeted, relevant and timely offers, information and messages to these customers. These will achieve significantly higher response rates and direct sales than generic marketing communications.

However getting customers to part with this information is a challenge in itself. This article looks at what information you can collect, how to get customers to part with it and how to use the data once you have collected it.

How to collect the profile information

Customers should be able to create or edit their profile at any time. A link to it should be created in every email and accessible via the website. Of course an obvious place should be on the registration or opt in page. You can even include the profile in traditional direct mail pieces as a direct response postcard. This would also enable you to collect further opted-in email addresses.

To encourage your customers to submit their details the following methods can be used:

Incentives
The offer of entry into a free prize draw, a donation to charity, a free white paper download or a trial subscription are all methods that will increase the amount of profiles that are collected.

Registration page
Collecting the information at the point of opt-in or point of purchase will increase the amount of information you will collect but it may potentially lead to a drop off in the number of people subscribing to a newsletter or completing their purchases. Simply by making this information optional at the time will remove this problem and further profile information can be collected at a later stage.

Merge with CRM data
You may also collect relevant data from your customers into various CRM and telesales databases. These can be separate from your opt-in list source but can be merged together to provide the profile information you require.

What to profile

There are no limits on the information you can potentially collect from your customers. However the more you ask for the less response you will get. Therefore it is essential that you only ask for information that you will have a further use for. Customer profiles should not be used as customer surveys – if you require this information from a sample of your customers then running an email survey campaign would be more effective. (Click here for our newsletter article on E-Surveys)

Using the profile data

Demographics

Examples of how to use this information include:

B2B Data
This can include information such as number of employees, annual turnover, industry sector and number of office locations.

Use of this data can include the sending of different newsletters for enterprise, corporate and SME customers or case studies from particular industry segments.

Product Interest
By collecting what the customer is interested in through their profile enables you to run very simple but effective targeted campaigns. For example if the customer has selected Pet Food as a product interest then special offers on Pet Food will increase the chances of the customer using this company. It can also be used for cross selling. For example if the customer has a stated interest in pet food then it is also likely that they would be interested in pet insurance services.

Purchase History
While you cannot expect to collect a detailed history of every item purchased you will be able to find out key information that you could use to target offers. A typical example of this would be a computer retailer asking the date the customer last purchased a PC. Based upon the knowledge that their customers purchase a new PC every 2-3 years on average the company can increase the amount of communication around this time and even run targeted telesales campaigns alongside email promotions.

Of course you can also combine the information held on your CRM database with your customer profiles. You can then use this data to identify your customers who have not made a recent purchase and target these with a new range of special offers to get them back into your store or e-commerce site.

Value
A few simple questions can enable you to determine the value of a customer and as a result how to communicate with them. For example an IT company might ask how many PC’s are in the organisation - this will demonstrate the potential of the company as a long term client.

Within a B2C environment it could be as simple as asking what the customers weekly spend on groceries is. This will enable the company to tailor the emails it sends to its customers by including different value ranges of products. It could also set-up special ‘Gold’ accounts for customers of high value to make them feel more valued by the company.

Email preferences
It is no longer vital to capture information on whether a customer prefers plain text or HTML newsletters. We estimate that over 95% of recipients we send to can read HTML while the remaining recipients will get a plain text version as we use a MIME format to send the emails. What is more important is to ask how often the customer would like to see a newsletter.

In industries such as the travel industry people tend to make their purchasing decisions once a year. If these customers are receiving numerous emails when they are not looking then they will probably unsubscribe from your emails or stop looking. Instead allow users to specify a pause in the emails they are receiving and to specify a month when they would like to start receiving them again. This will only strengthen the relationship between you and the customer.

Customer Responsiveness and time opted-in
Record the date at the point of registration. This is usually a simple automated process that the customer cannot see. This along with the tracking of the opens, click-thrus and other responses enables marketers to identify if there are any customers who have not been enticed to read or act upon your emails and newsletters and to send them a different offer to prompt action.

To maximise the potential of this information different profile data should be combined. Examples of this are below:

1. Combining B2B Data (Number of employees) with product categories the customer has shown an interest in to send emails recommending the best range of IT hardware solutions for their company.

2. Combining demographics (Postcode) and customer value to send the best customers an email inviting them to a special evening at their local store where they will get extra discounts.

Summary

This approach detailed above is underused. One of the main reasons being the extra work required. Rather than a single email being produced several emails have to be produced. However the benefits gained from sending highly targeted emails will be displayed on your bottom line, as your campaigns will become more effective.

With email there are also minimal costs involved. With direct mail requiring large print runs to make it cost effective this highly targeted segmentation would produce too small data sets. Email of course costs very little to produce and send in comparison.