5 Innovative Ways to Capture Data
To keep your company’s cash flowing, collecting customer data is a must. Whether you’re a business owner or marketing director, you want your database to grow organically over time. When you start to build a customer profile, make sure your marketing team dive into the statistics. The more you know about your audience, the more effective your personalised marketing will be. Unfortunately, standard online promotions and generic email blasts just aren’t enough anymore. To keep your business moving forward, you need to capture customer data and use it for personalised marketing. But how do you capture fresh customer data without investing large sums of cash? In this article, we explore 5 innovative ways to capture data to help you get started.
1. Offer an Incentive
Offers and incentives encourage customers to provide their data. Setting up relevant polls or surveys and offering genuine, worthwhile incentives will encourage visitors to engage with you. Not only will customers be happy to pass their data to you, but the results of the polls and surveys will be useful to your persona creation strategies and business plans.
Competitions are another effective way to pull in fresh data. For best results, include a mandatory customer detail form as part of the competition process. While competition prizes can be costly, the amount of data you gather will be worth the investment.
It’s worth noting that incentives don’t have to be expensive. Depending on your business, you may already have incentives at your disposal. These could include free consultations, vouchers, eBooks and discounts. As long as the incentive offers value to your customers, they will be more than happy to divulge their information.
2. Engage on Social Media
Social media is another tool at your disposal. Attract customers to your channels using relevant content that encourages them to give their data. If you offer rich, valuable content, they will be happy to trade their information for your resources. The best way to capture data through social media is to embed a subscription form on your channels. This allows customers to join your database impulsively in an easy-to-use format. Thankfully, you can use a web form builder to create an optimised form that is clear and simple – this will encourage visitors to fill out the form. Before using the form on your channels, test how long it takes to fill it out. If it takes over a minute, consider shortening it to avoid losing interest.
3. Use Online Marketing Analytics
Online marketing analytics is a great way to capture data. When people visit your website, Google Analytics can provide demographic data on each visitor. This data can then be used to help you prepare marketing campaigns and show you which parts of your site are getting the most attention. Heatmaps can then show you which sections of the page around generating the most interactions or mouse clicks. Social media analytics can also teach you about your followers, and Facebook marketing tools can help you market to people that mimic your current audience. The amount of data that can be captured through online marketing analytics is almost limitless. For best results, work with a marketing team to install programs and plugins that collect and store data securely.
4. Implement a Customer Rewards Program
Many shops now offer a discount simply for signing up for a reward card. This is because the data they can capture from this process is worth the money they’ll lose out on. Your customer shopping profile is more valuable than a couple of pounds here and there. With this information, they can analyse your shopping habits and even estimate your annual income. To capture data this way, create a rewards program for your customers. Not only is this a way to capture data, but it will also boost your sales by encouraging repeat shopping. With data on how, when and what shoppers are purchasing, you can better tailor your products and marketing strategies. For best results, sync the rewards program up with your e-commerce site for more information.
5. Utilise Third-Party Loyalty Programs
Many companies are now using third-party loyalty programs to capture data. A good example of this is Shopkick. Shoppers can create a profile and earn rewards when they shop at sponsored stores, use sponsored products and use a linked debit card to complete their purchase. If you partner with a third-party loyalty program, you can purchase the data they collect on your customers. Better still, you can pay for data from every other store that participates in the promotion. This information can help you analyse future bundle offers and promotions.
So, there you have it – 5 innovative ways to capture data. As you can see, there are many ways to capture and analyse customer data. As customers interact with your company, from browsing to final purchase, you’ll collect insights into how you can personalise your marketing – a key factor in creating customer loyalty. As your brand develops to meet the observed needs of your audience, you’ll uncover new ways to expand or focus your products or services on the things that generate the most attention.
When you use personalised marketing, your customers feel like you’re meeting their unique wants and needs. This results in an increase in purchase frequency, basket size and overall customer value. While investing in large data collection and analytics tools can be worthwhile, the methods above are a great way to get started. Remember that any money spent on data collection is an investment. Before long, you’ll have a data-driven marketing strategy that pays for itself.