What You Don’t Know About Your Customers

When you know about your customers, it helps you when you talk to them.  Whether the data is used to improve customer relationships or convert a prospect into a customer, what you know about them helps you make a better decision.  A friend of mine calls it “the art of being right.”

Having useful data lets you talk to customers and sell them more of what you have.  If the truism holds that, “the best customer is an existing customer,” then every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to sell them something else.  By using data about your customers and performing real-time analysis of the data, companies can offer new products and services to customers with greater success at lower cost.  (Don’t take this as an opportunity to sell them junk.  If what you sell stops being useful, then you’re not going to have a customer for much longer.  You shouldn’t leave a customer with buyer’s remorse.)

There are lots of opportunities to look at data on your customers.  It’s possible to determine the benefit of advertising campaigns or conversion of prospects to sales.  Google’s Adsense and Google Analytics harness data and make them free to potential advertisers.  Their view is that the more effective your advertising becomes, the more money you’ll spend getting ads in front of the right prospects.  (For those that use ad blocking software, Google also states that the better the ads and the more relevant to your search, the less likely you are to block the ads in the first place.)