Marketing outsourcing The most effective strategies to grow your customer base
The customer base gives access to extremely important data from the point of view of sales and marketing departments. Thanks to them, the company can stay in touch with consumers, build their loyalty to the brand and encourage them to carry out further transactions. What exactly is a customer base? What is worth remembering when creating it? How can it be effectively enlarged?
What is a customer base?
A customer database is a set of organized, structured data on a company’s customers. They can be modified and updated on a regular basis. This type of database contains all the necessary information collected during various types of interactions between customers and the company. As a standard, it contains socio-demographic data such as gender, age, marital status or income level and psychophysical criteria, including, among others, interest centres or media attendance. In addition, the database may also contain data on key contacts in the enterprise, which play a key role in making purchase decisions by customers, and thus – generating profits.
What is the purpose of creating a customer database? Thanks to it, the company is able to properly direct its offer and personalize it according to the profile of individual consumers. This directly translates into building better relationships with customers. In other words, the database facilitates contact with them and helps to adapt the company’s offer to their needs. It contributes to the increase in sales and the level of customer satisfaction and loyalty to the company. But that’s not all. The customer base helps the company understand the value of each consumer and his purchasing behaviour. It allows you to quickly and conveniently view all your transactions and purchase history and check whether a person is a regular customer or has only made a query about a particular product or service.
A better understanding of consumer behaviour directly translates into revenue growth. Knowing exactly what they are looking for, you can offer them the right solution at the right time.
It is worth remembering that data collection in the customer database must be organized in such a way as to ensure the best possible performance. There is a rule that only information that is really needed in customer relationships and in line with the planned marketing strategy can be collected.
The nature of the data collected depends on the status of the company. In B2B relations, i.e. those that take place between two or more enterprises, the focus should be on legal and administrative data. These include: the name of the company, its registration numbers, size, sector of activity, email address, telephone number and the function performed in the company by the contact person.
On the other hand, when it comes to B2C relationships, i.e. those that occur between a company and an individual customer, this type of customer database should include data on the customer’s age, gender, interests, buying behaviour, satisfaction level and consumer journey, i.e. the number of orders or average shopping cart.
How to build a customer database?
A well-built and constantly expanded customer database is a proven way to consolidate the strong position of the brand on the market and increase its profits. What is worth remembering when creating it? Here are some practical tips.
Understand what your customer wants
The first thing to remember when building a customer database is to talk to potential customers. They allow us to better understand what a person’s needs are and, consequently, what products or services they may be interested in. During such a conversation, you should not focus solely on basic questions about your name or address. Far more effective are the deepening questions, e.g. those about the profession or interests. They effectively shorten the distance and make the customer feel important, which positively affects how he perceives the company. Answering these questions will make it much easier for the company employee to re-contact him in the future and ask in the next conversation if there were new needs related to key issues for the customer.
Promote your business on social networks
Social media campaigns can also help in the process of creating a customer database. For example, Facebook allows not only to effectively build a community of users interested in a given topic. It also allows you to generate leads with the help of the Lead Ads format. What is that? It is a form of advertising aimed at acquiring customers and generating sales. It is designed to collect leads ready to leave you their contact details. Lead Ads works through a contact form where you can ask potential customers to leave data such as name, email address, phone number, date of birth, place of residence or occupation. When running a campaign on Facebook or other social media, remember to optimize your activities. This will achieve measurable benefits while reducing the cost of a single ad.
Yet, can you promote your business on social networks? Another helpful solution that can contribute to a larger customer base is bots on Facebook Messenger. This form of communication with the user with a scheme of action somewhat resembles email marketing. What does it look like in practice? Subscribers receive messages here from a bot, a slot based on the algorithm of artificial intelligence, which purpose is to imitate human behaviour. This solution is particularly well suited for younger recipients, who use Facebook Messenger much more often than even email. What should be characterized by an effective newsletter sent via a bot? Its content must be concise and include a call to action with a redirect to the website.
In order to effectively expand the customer database, it is also worth using the potential of LinkedIn, an international social network specializing in professional and business contacts. In particular, a paid version of Sales Navigator is worth recommending, which helps to build and qualify potential customers. It contains over 20 advanced filters that allow you to search individual companies for their size, location, or industry. Thanks to Sales Navigator, the user can quickly and conveniently reach people belonging to different groups on the site. Once joined, it is possible to send messages to its members, excluding the invitation element.
Collaborate with other companies
How else can you quickly and effectively expand your customer database? For this purpose, it is worth looking for a company with which you will be able to establish cooperation, send together commercial offers to both groups of recipients. It is best to have a company offering similar but not identical products or services. The registration form should be supplemented with an appropriate clause, so that every saved person is aware that his email address will be made available to another company as well.
Run marketing email campaigns
Another popular way to create a customer database is email marketing, which is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail for communication. Thanks to it, you can remind users about your brand and inform them about the products and services offered by it or current promotions. The activities in the field of email marketing are based on sending newsletters, i.e. emails sent systematically to a specific group of recipients. They are designed to distribute content, provide offers related to user preferences and build relationships with them.
Keep your site content up-to-date
Every professional company should regularly update the content on its website. High-quality, often refreshed content is a proven way to high position of the site in search results, and thus – the ability to reach a wide audience. A good way to enlarge the recipient database is to place a registration form on the website to the mailing list. It is worth it to be located in several places, such as a subpage containing a description of the offer or a company blog.
Continue and maintain excellent customer service and support
As the research results show, the cost of maintaining a regular customer is 5 times lower than getting a new one. Therefore, it is worth grouping the information obtained at the stage of creating the database accordingly. This will allow you to personalize the offers you send, for example due to interest in specific services or a specific region of the country. Thanks to this, the customer will gain the awareness that the company knows its needs and preferences, and thus – it can be trusted.
Building a customer base is an integral part of the work of every company. Properly constructed and regularly supplemented, it positively affects the number of recipients, and thus – the profits of the company.
