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Saves cost in marketing activities. Imagine having access to your customers directly. You can communicate with them at a very low cost or also at no cost at all.
You can send them emails, sms, Whatsapp messages announcing new offers, new products, discounts and much more. You are sure these emails will reach those who already purchased your products.

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Save on your marketing budget. You can also use their contact details in retargeting and remarketing activities when promoting your products via ads. Facebook and Google have great tools to help you reach out to your audience when conducting your marketing activities.

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Improve the relationship with your clientele. You can improve the direct communication with your clients, build loyalty and reach them on the right channels. You will also understand their changing behaviors and preferences. COVID-19 is a great example of that. In a previous blog post, I shared how the connected consumer‘s behavior changed during the pandemic. When you have your consumers’ data, this will allow you to quickly adapt. Retaining your customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. Don’t confuse repeat customers with loyal customers. Loyal customers are willing to turn down better offers to purchase from you and these are the customers you need. Understand your customers to improve your relationship with them.

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Improves sales revenues. When your database is well categorized, you can offer your customers the products they are willing to buy based on their preferences. You will not overwhelm them with a large number of products. You can create personalized experiences, offers, even products that they are very likely to buy. You can offer them special discounts before launching the promotion on the website to the public. Sephora is offering special discounts for its loyal customers.

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Improve your production. Because your products will be purchased by your customers, you can get direct feedback from your customers, collect reviews, or products feedback. You can also push it further by asking them to contribute to the production of new products or also review existing products; the packaging, the product functionality, ingredients, and much more. There is no limit to how much your customers are willing to contribute to your products, simply because they are using them. Imagine, your customers will share with you the need for a new product and you produce it for them. This product will be sold immediately because it is the answer to a need that they shared with you.

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Helps you create a community. Create a community around your brand everywhere, on your website, on social media, physically, create a community. Create a loyalty program to give your community an edge. Check out Sephora’s community, they created a special section for the community to share their thoughts and make the clients feel like an influencer on the website. This is a space where everyone is the star because they are part of the Sephora community. This helps the brand collect feedback from the customers, read their pain points, their needs, their preferences, what they love, what they do, how they use the product. When the brand listens to these conversations, it can find new opportunities to grow or improve its business. You can also request reviews and collect customer feedback. You can get help when producing a new product, ask your community to share their feedback and thoughts about the design, the packaging, their preferences and that is when sales are guaranteed because everyone will want to buy a product they contributed to. They will also become your ambassadors, on social media and everywhere else.

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Helps you Analyze your consumer behavior. Don’t just stop at the level of data collection. You need to know how to analyze it. Look for trends, identify them, categorize your database and confirm these findings with your community. Understand how your visitors are browsing your website and act upon that. You can use your website’s analytics and use Google analytics to have more detailed insights. Keep an eye on the cart abandonment, these are prospects who decided not to purchase your products for a reason. It has become a trend to abandon the cart because visitors know you will target them with a discount. These are a category of customers who want to purchase your products but are not willing to pay the full price.

If you are selling your products on a reseller’s website or If you are facing trouble collecting data on social media, here are some ideas for you.
When selling on a reseller’s website, chances are very rare that you will be having access to the end-user data. You can overcome this issue by offering a loyalty program to those who purchase directly from your website or offering them a special discount available only upon purchase on your website. Mention these on the product label, add a QR code to help your customers find you. Why should you do that? Because selling products on a third-party website is not an efficient long-term strategy, it is risky in case the website goes out of business, not to mention it is costly.

If you have a large audience on social networks and you don’t know how to direct them to your website to collect their data, you can share discount codes on your channels that are only claimable on your website via a form that requests their contact details. You can also run a referral program to collect prospects’ data. Create a newsletter on your website that your visitors can subscribe to and add a code to it for a discount or gift and promote it on social media. Kate Spade offers a discount and free shipping to those who join their mailing list. Orogold Cosmetics is also offering a 20% discount on the purchase for every signup. They also offer a gift to 5 lucky winners each month to collect their data. Upon submitting your information, they send an email to confirm the entry. This process allows them to confirm the data they have collected and that the email is an active one.

If you are not already collecting your customer data or you are collecting it and want to improve it, here is how you can start your data collection process.
You are worried you don’t have a budget for a CRM, don’t worry, you can start with a simple excel sheet, and after generating more revenues, make sure to invest in a CRM that will help you make your work faster. If your audience is limited, an excel sheet will do.
There are no specific rules to the information you need to collect, what matters most, is to collect the data that will give you the insights you need to grow your business.
Here are some examples of the basic info you can collect:
– Full name
– Phone Number
– Email Address
– Address/Country
– Products purchased – you can find it on your website and it will allow you to identify a trend and personal preferences of your database
– Number of products purchased per transaction – this information is available on your website and will allow you to estimate your average basket and plan your production
– Time of purchase – this information is available on your website. Is your customer purchasing in the morning, afternoon, night, weekends, weekdays, seasonal? This will allow you to define which days or hours the customers don’t purchase and refine your marketing strategy accordingly. Maybe you can run offers to activate the purchases during times when the sales are low.
– Payment method – you can find it on your website. Are your customers purchasing cash or via card and which card.
– Number of times the user has made a purchase – you can find it on your website. It will help you identify your returning customers.

Other insights to keep an eye on, can be collected from Google analytics.
– Most visited products – Match them with your sales and check if the most-visited products are those that are mostly purchased. If not, you need to have a competitors’ analysis and review your customers’ feedback to understand why your visitors are not purchasing your product. It could be expensive or doesn’t offer the features the visitors are looking for among other reasons.
– User behavior on your website. Check out the pages where your visitors are dropping off and review the page.
You can also check my other blog on Tips to Improve Customer Data Collection.