It’s time to get to know your customers

Get To Know Your Customer Day is a day when businesses go the extra mile to delight their customers. But that’s nothing new to the thousands of brands using Dotdigital to connect with customers.

Customer experience is at the center of every marketing strategy. Without a good customer experience, customers have no reason to be loyal to your brand, and to create a good customer experience, you need to know your customers.

Customer data makes the customer experience

To deliver the kind of experience that drives loyalty, you need to know what your customers want in the first place. Understanding what customers need, what inspires them, and what they want out of the experience with help you create micro-moments that provoke long-lasting loyalty.

This means customer data is essential.

All this comes at a time when earning customer trust is harder than it’s ever been. In the decision-making stage, 70% of customers believe that trust is central when picking a brand to shop with, but 56% are more mistrustful of how companies use their data. In addition, highly publicized Apple and Google updates around cookies, tracking, privacy have ensured your audiences are more aware of the data brands collect on them.

To earn their trust, you need to be open, honest, and transparent about why you’re collecting their data and how you intend to use it. Customers are happier to give you their personal information when there is a guaranteed value exchange. In short, they want something for it. That something is a personalized and memorable experience with your brand.

Top tips to get to know your customers

So, you know you need customer data to enrich the customer experience but how do you go about collecting it?

You need to be open and honest, earn their trust, and demonstrate additional value in the exchange. Making a list of all the things you need to do to get to know your customers can be daunting; achieving it all can be even more so.

We know you’ve heard about the importance of preference centers (especially if you’ve been reading our blogs for a while) and behavioral data. They’re key for delivering timely, relevant, and personalized marketing.

But with laws changing and tech companies thinking more conscientiously about users’ privacy, it’s time for marketers to focus on collecting more zero-party data. The more information you can collect directly from your customers, the higher the quality of the data will be. The better quality the data, the better the experience and the more loyal customers will be.

Below you’ll find our top tips for getting to know your customers. By collecting information in a fun and engaging way, you’re likely to get more responses with more informative answers.

1. Quizzes

Quizzes are fun and engaging for all users. They’re also a great way to learn about your customers.

The beauty brand, Doe, learns everything it needs to about new customers at the point of sign up thanks to this super fun quiz.

It’s then able to use this information to deliver a highly personalized and relevant experience. Using the data collected during the quiz, it’s able to segment customers based on their personal style and preferences. And they can do all this without having to encourage shoppers to update their preferences.

2. Live chat

The benefits of live chat are numerous. As well as helping to smooth the path to purchase and boosting the after-sales process, live chat is a fantastic tool to learn about your customers.

As your agents are chatting with customers, they can be collecting a lot of valuable information. Adding an option to opt-in to your marketing is a great way to ensure these customers continue to receive the top-notch customer experience they expect having spoken directly to your staff.  Footwear brand, Converse Mexico uses live chat to capture 29% of its marketing list, with over 25% of them converting into paying customers.

3. Competitions

Everyone loves a competition. Seriously, who doesn’t like the idea of getting something for nothing?

Competitions and contests are great for converting customers, but they also have to added benefit of being highly engaging and good for generating UGC.

Headphone brand, AfterShokz uses competitions for exactly this reason. As well as encouraging customers to engage with its content, it also drives subscribers to become brand advocates. By promoting their activities on social media they’re helping to boost your brand reputation.

All the while, it’s utilizing a high level of engagement to gather mobile numbers and loyalty program sign-ups with a clear explanation about the benefits both offer to the customer experience.

4. Polls and surveys

Polls and surveys can help you create full, well-rounded profiles of your customers. You can learn a lot about what they like and dislike with a few simple questions.

Netflix regularly asks for feedback on its offerings. Keeping it simple with a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ vote will still provide you with invaluable information that will help direct your product development in the future.

If you decide to go for a longer form try offering a discount code or other benefits. This will help you drive responses.

5. AMP for emails

When a customer is on the go or time-poor, these longer experiences may not be right to capture their attention. That’s where we introduce AMP for email.

AMP for email allows you to create in-email experiences that don’t require subscribers to leave the inbox to complete an action. Collecting preferences, surveys, polls, and data collection are all possible from one place without having to build landing pages or wait for page load times.