Steps to create your customer profile

For any eCommerce business, understanding who your customers are is one of the most important aspects.

You need to understand your customers properly to market, sell, and offer support to your customers. This is where the importance of customer profiles is felt.

What is a Customer Profile?

Also referred to as consumer profile, a customer profile is a document that contains information of customers such as age, interests, purchasing pattern, income, demographic characteristics, and pain points. The document is presented in such a way that it looks like the description of a real person along with a name and an image.

Basically, a customer profile tells you all the information of people that are required to convert them into customers. When we say user profiles or buyer personas, it means the same as customer profiles.

Benefits of Customer Profiling

You must be thinking why you need customer profiling and why it is so important to run a business. Let’s check some benefits that customer profiling offers:

• Find new leads easily

When you use the customer profiles together, you know the exact characteristics that your potential customers share. The data is very beneficial for the sales team as they can use the information to generate new leads that fall on the same criteria.

• Qualify new leads quickly

When the leads come from the sales team, only one-fourth of the total leads are actually the ones that need to be converted. Identifying the leads that are actually going to make purchases is more important. So, using the data you have collected already, you can prioritize nurturing by mapping each new lead that comes in and mapping them across your customer profiles.

• Targeted content

As customer profiles offer you different information about people, you can use the data to send targeted content. You can tailor content based on your target audience to convert them into customers through a weekly email newsletter.

• Customer loyalty

Your work doesn’t end at converting leads into customers. Customer retention is another important aspect that needs to be taken into consideration when you run an online store. You should encourage your existing customers to make repeated purchases and become loyal to your brand. Retaining old customers is much cheaper than gaining new ones.

As you know the likes and dislikes of your customers, you can engage them through personalised efforts. This helps in improving the overall experience of your customers with your brand to become loyal customers.

Ways to Create Customer Profiles

Creating a customer profile is an absolute necessity to remain competitive in this eCommerce business environment. However, guessing the traits your target audience share usually turns out to be inaccurate. So, adopt a systematic approach to gather data and information about your target audience. Understand aspects like customers’ buying behaviour, needs, and so on to reach your targets.

Here are the steps of creating customer profiles:

• Identify your best customers

The first and foremost thing that you need to do is identifying the customers who like your products or services. Take out some customers from the existing customer base who are getting the most value out from the products or services you offer. For those who are new into the business and don’t have a long list of customers, you should make out the type of people who would get the most value out of your offerings.

• List your customers’ notable attributes

After creating a list of your best customers, take out all the vital attributes of the customers that are related to demographics such as age, gender and ethnicity, psychographics such as hobbies, values, aspirations and pain points, socio-economics, and geographic segmentation.

• Do survey

Knowing the attributes will make your realise that you know a lot about your customers by now. However, there remains some gap which you can fill by conducting surveys. You can use survey tools to create surveys on specific traits of the customers.

• Fill in the template of customer profile

Now as you know your best customers, how you value them and an overview of why they are associated with your business, put all the information in a single document to serve as customer profiles. While creating customer profiles, you can keep the level of detail according to requirements. However, keeping it simple is recommended by experts.