The key elements to effective customer profiling: data

Gathering customer information for your e-commerce store is important, so why not make it top-notch? This article explores the criteria involved in making a great customer profile. By discovering the best way to engage with your customers, you can add value to your store’s customer interaction and demographics. Consider building an ideal profile for your targeted customers—primarily those who will benefit your company. Refining these marketing strategies are key to understanding your customers and helping your business thrive through Shopify.

Tip: A customer profile is “a description of a customer, or set of customers, that includes demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics, as well as buying patterns, creditworthiness, and purchase history.” 

4 tips to creating great customer profiles:

1. Identify the primary needs of your customers, how they found out about you, and what you can offer them.

By evaluating your current customer information, you can more efficiently forecast and target future customers. Find out what makes your products unique to your customers and how you can adjust to what they’re looking for. One of the essential ways to innovate your Shopify store is by evaluating how you can improve & apply your consumer knowledge.

2. Demographic factors are fundamental to gathering statistical information about your customers.

We recommend creating some generic fields in order to fully understand what kind of crowd your company is attracting. Consider learning characteristics such as age, gender, location or occupation. Basic fields such as these are profoundly insightful when looking at the consumer population as a whole. If you’re into statistics, this will also give you a chance to work those numbers.

3. Personalize to your preferences and specialties.

Every e-commerce store is unique and requires its own set of customer information. This is where thinking outside the box comes into play; evaluate what information your company finds value in. Whether it’s dress size or kitchenware preference, customize and prioritize to what you consider beneficial to your Shopify store.

4. Don’t overdo it.

This is likely the most significant piece of advice. Keeping your fields simple is key to a beautiful & effective customer profile. Although the amount of fields you can create is essentially unlimited, adding too many fields can make customers more reluctant to complete their profile to begin with. When you have too many fields, it can: 1) overwhelm your customers 2) clutter up the webpage 3) add more data to process & filter through.

This simple rule can help: Only collect data you can use.

If you can’t think of how a certain piece of data will help you meet your customer’s needs or market to them more effectively, don’t ask. 😄