Our society, shopping experiences and work days are defined by our every click, preference and recorded journey.
It is therefore no wonder that so many businesses value their customer databases more than ever. Unfortunately, such reliance on data when it comes to customer management can be counterintuitive.
When it comes to customers one size certainly doesn’t fit all. Yet, all too often, they’re treated as a number, hidden in a spreadsheet or an indexed line amongst a thousand more in a database.
Here are the most common pitfalls to avoid, helping you to make sure your customers don’t get lost in the crowd.
Falling foul of ’spray and pray’ syndrome
While it may be tempting to save time during an email marketing campaign by sending your promotional message to all and sundry, the likelihood is you’ll simply irritate the vast majority of your customer base in doing so.
The customer of today expects relevancy and detests spam. Treat them like a database, and you’ll fall short on both counts.
If you can segment your database into habits, likes, dislikes and purchasing history, you’ll start to build a picture of individual customers. Such knowledge is powerful and enables you to send marketing communications that are tailored to each person.
You’ll be indistinguishable from the rest
Customer experience is a key battleground in business and those that are victorious are the ones that recognise the importance of personalisation and a tailored experience.
By tailoring the way customers encounter your business, you will begin to stand out from the countless others that simply blast out marketing communications en masse. By knowing exactly who your customers are and attending to what they want will lead to a smoother and more positive customer experience.
You’ll miss sales opportunities
You may have a tightly-defined buyer’s journey, but do you know how far your customers progress through it? Do they make it to the end or are they leaving abandoned digital shopping carts all over your online store?
What about those customers who are missing opportunities to increase the value of their purchase and, in turn, boost your bottom line? Without detailed knowledge of your customers as individuals, you’ll never know (or take advantage of) their shopping habits.
You’ll never get to say ‘thanks’
Your best customers are right under your nose, but if they’re just an entry on a spreadsheet or within a CRM system, how will you ever get the chance to reach out and say ‘thank you for being such a wonderful customer’?
Your customers want to feel loved and valued. If you know more about them - their purchase history, average order values and shopping frequency - you have the ability to reach out and tell them why they mean so much to you and further increase their brand advocacy.
We hope this post has tempted you to delve deeper into your customer database. There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a list of customers grow in tandem with rising revenue, but the bigger it gets, the more chance you have of inadvertently distancing yourself from the most important aspect of your business.
Mastering the art of customer experience has never been easier; with data allowing businesses to know their customers’ habits better than they do themselves, it seems silly to not reap the benefits.
Get close to your customers. Be on first name terms with them. Show them that they mean the world to you and prove you’ve been listening. But, whatever you do, don’t treat them like a number on a database. They’re so much more than that.
If you're truly interested in getting closer to your customers, you might want to consider the approaches you're currently taking to obtain information about them. One of our recent blogs covers 'why less is more when asking for customer feedback' which is a great starting point to get your organisation in the right mindset to retrieve information from your customer and learn about them.
