4 Tips to Getting To Know Your Online Customers
An important part of any business is to know your customer.
The better you know them, the better you can communicate to them, offer support to them, as well as market to them and encourage them to keep coming back.
You don’t have the luxury of building a face-to-face rapport if your business is based online, so what can you do to get to know your customers?
1. Check out your analytics
Whether it’s through your email marketing system, your social media channels, or simply the data of who visits your site and how you can gather plenty of data to tell you more about your customers.
Aside from basic demographics, which you can use to get a better profile of them, you can also gather important information on how they use your services and interact with your business, allowing you to sharpen those parts of your business approach.
Just make sure that you work hard to keep any customer data safe. If you keep it, you are responsible for making sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
2. Make good use of signup forms
Aside from the data that your various online platforms already collect automatically for you, you can get extra insight into your customers by using signup forms.
Whether they have to sign up to shop with you, to complete an order, to get your email newsletter, or otherwise, this can be your opportunity to gather a little extra data.
Make sure you ask for the kind of data you’re not already getting through your analytics and don’t ask for too much, or most visitors won’t take the time to complete the form in the first place.
3. Ask for their feedback directly
Never be afraid to reach out and ask for customer feedback. Many of them will have thoughts about their experiences using their services and, even if they don’t, many appreciate having the opportunity to be heard. Don’t just ask for feedback in a blank form, however.
Use established formats like maxdiff analysis to get specific feedback on areas of your site or service that you’re looking to improve.
Many customers might not have thought of the words to describe their experiences, but with a little encouragement, can easily voice their thoughts.
4. Collate all your information
Every bit of personalized data you get, every bit of feedback, and every customer interaction (from sales call to sales conversion and beyond) can be put together to help you build great profiles of individual customers.
This is one of the primary purposes of customer relationship management software. This way, whenever a member of your team gets in contact with a customer, or you are contacted by them, you can bring up their details to get an overview of their history with the company.
It helps to build continuity in customer service that streamlines things and helps customers feel valuable and worth remembering.
There are plenty of ways to still get to know your customers and even to build that personal rapport with them online. You just need to be a little more inventive with it.
