Knowing who your customers are is a big part of marketing success, whether in direct mail or any other marketing efforts. There are some great tips you can use to create your ideal customer profile, so you know who you are marketing to when you design a direct mail campaign.
Type of Information to Gather
There are several key pieces of information you want to know about your ideal customers, including:
- Your existing customer database holds the key to quick and easy customer profiling. The people who are already buying from you are the same type of people you should be targeting, because they had already demonstrated demand for your products and services.
- Take note of the average age of your customers. Are they younger, older, or do you have a range of age groups that buy from you?
- Figure out if your customers are married, single or divorced. Marital status often determines spending habits, and there are different offers that couples and singletons are more likely to respond to.
- Figure out where your customers live. Do they live close to your business, or further away? Is proximity a factor, or less important to your customers?
- Do they own their home, or do they rent? If they are homeowners, what is the value of their home?
- Whether they have children, and if so, how many and what ages.
- Their hobbies and interests.
- What they buy from you.
If you are already using a CRM system to manage your customers, you may be able to export this data from your system. Alternatively, have your sales team create their individual lists and merge them into one.
Working with Customer Data
One of the best ways to work with customer data once you have prepared it is with a spreadsheet. This allows you to sort data by columns, and look for similarities between your typical customer that you can use for your direct mail marketing efforts. Most companies find that instead of a single type of customer, you have a few core types, of different age groups or circumstances. Create profiles for each of those customer types, and you will have a pretty clear picture of who you are marketing to.
Using Customer Profiles
Your customer data can help you to design more effective direct mail campaigns. For instance, if you notice that customers who live nearby your store tend to buy a particular product or service more than the others, then you can target marketing in that area to that product or service.
You can also use this information to cross sell to customers, based on demographics. If you already know that customers of a particular age group buy a certain item from you, and you start making or selling a similar item, you can target your direct mail campaign for the new item based on the demographics of the neighborhoods you target.
Knowledge Is Power
The saying knowledge is power definitely applies to sales data, and the more you have the better. Before you create your next direct mail campaign, consider looking at your customer profile, and build your campaign around what your customers want and buy, rather than what you want to sell.
