Customer data

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Customer data or consumer data refers to all personal, behavioural, and demographic data that is collected by marketing companies and departments from their customer base. [1] To some extent, data collection from customers intrudes into customer privacy, the exact limits to the type and amount of data collected need to be regulated. [2] [3] The data collected is processed in customer analytics. The data collection is thus aimed at insights into customer behaviour (buying decisions, etc.) and, eventually, profit maximization by consolidation and expansion of the customer base. [4]

Contents

In the internet age, a prominent method for collecting customer data is through explicit online surveys, [5] but also through concealed methods like measurement of click-through and abandonment rates.[ citation needed ]

Online surveys are a direct approach, allowing companies to gather detailed customer insights by asking specific questions. This method provides qualitative data, which can be analyzed to understand customer preferences, opinions, and behaviors.

Measurement of click-through rates (CTR) is another vital method. CTR measures how often people who see an online ad or link end up clicking on it. This metric helps companies assess the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and understand what attracts their audience's attention.

Abandonment rates measure how often users leave a website or an online process before completing their intended action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. High abandonment rates can indicate problems with website usability or the customer journey, providing valuable data for improving user experience and increasing conversions.

Together, these methods offer a comprehensive view of customer behavior and preferences, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and enhance their marketing strategies.

Customer data is gathered for customer research, especially customer satisfaction research and purportedly serves to increase overall customer satisfaction. [6]

Levels of information

A possible classification of business customer information was proposed by Minna J. Rollins, who distinguished the levels a) market b) organizational c) business unit, and d) individual. [7] For private consumers, different levels are a) personal identifying data b) psychographics data, c) transactional (buying) data, d) demographic, and e) financial data. [6] While the individual data level for business customers has some overlap with the data gathered from individual consumers, the other business-related levels roughly correspond to the demographic part of individual customers. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

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A demographic profile is a form of demographic analysis in which information is gathered about a group to better understand the group's composition or behaviors for the purpose of providing more relevant services.

Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior.

Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers. Advancements in data collection methods, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics, have enabled marketers to deploy more effective real-time and prolonged customer experience personalization tactics.

Database marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses databases of customers or potential customers to generate personalized communications in order to promote a product or service for marketing purposes. The method of communication can be any addressable medium, as in direct marketing.

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives: build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

Neuromarketing is a commercial marketing communication field that applies neuropsychology to market research, studying consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing stimuli. The potential benefits to marketers include more efficient and effective marketing campaigns and strategies, fewer product and campaign failures, and ultimately the manipulation of the real needs and wants of people to suit the needs and wants of marketing interests.

The target audience is the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message catered specifically to the previously intended audience. In marketing and advertising, the target audience is a particular group of consumer within the predetermined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital marketing</span> Marketing of products or services using digital technologies or digital tools

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development during the 1990s and 2000s changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly used digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e-books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones, callbacks, and on-hold mobile ringtones. The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.

Customer analytics is a process by which data from customer behavior is used to help make key business decisions via market segmentation and predictive analytics. This information is used by businesses for direct marketing, site selection, and customer relationship management. Marketing provides services to satisfy customers. With that in mind, the productive system is considered from its beginning at the production level, to the end of the cycle at the consumer. Customer analytics plays an important role in the prediction of customer behavior.

A click path or clickstream is the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site, presented in the order viewed. A visitor's click path may start within the website or at a separate third party website, often a search engine results page, and it continues as a sequence of successive webpages visited by the user. Click paths take call data and can match it to ad sources, keywords, and/or referring domains, in order to capture data.

A target market, also known as serviceable obtainable market (SOM), is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market at which a business aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total market for a product or service.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Targeted advertising</span> Form of advertising

Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.

Social network advertising, also known as social media targeting, is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing that focus on social networking services. A significant aspect of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of users' demographic information, psychographics, and other data points to target their ads.

Marketing accountability is a term that signifies management with data that is understandable to the management of the enterprise. "Accountable Marketing" is another name that can be given to this process.

Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors' activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the operator to infer their preferences and may be of interest to various parties, such as advertisers. Web tracking can be part of visitor management.

In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions—that is, site visitors who are paying customers.

Behavioral analytics is a recent advancement in business analytics that reveals new insights into the behavior of consumers on eCommerce platforms, online games, web and mobile applications, and Internet of Things (IoT). The rapid increase in the volume of raw event data generated by the digital world enables methods that go beyond demographics and other traditional metrics that tell us what kind of people took what actions in the past. Behavioral analysis focuses on understanding how consumers act and why, enabling predictions about how they are likely to act in the future. It enables marketers to make the right offers to consumer segments at the right time.

Data-driven marketing is a process used by marketers to gain insights and identify trends about consumers and how they behave — what they buy, the effectiveness of ads, and how they browse. Modern solutions rely on big data strategies and collect information about consumer interactions and engagements to generate predictions about future behaviors. This kind of analysis involves understanding the data that is already present, the data that can be acquired, and how to organize, analyze, and apply that data to better marketing efforts. The intended goal is generally to enhance and personalize the customer experience. The market research allows for a comprehensive study of preferences.

References

  1. Kroll, Lee; Feldman, H. Leigh; Schienberg, Alan (May 23, 2019). "It's time to embrace customer data privacy and security". IBM RegTech Innovations Blog. Archived from the original on Jul 8, 2019. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  2. Gupta, Sachin; Schneider, Matthew (June 1, 2018). "Protecting Customers' Privacy Requires More than Anonymizing Their Data". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  3. Brown, Brad; Kanagasabai, Kumar; Pant, Prashant; Pinto, Gonçalo Serpa (2017-03-15). "Capturing value from your customer data". McKinsey & Company. Retrieved 2018-08-15. In an increasingly customer-centric world, the ability to capture and use customer insights to shape products, solutions, and the buying experience as a whole is critically important. Research tells us that organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.1 Customer data must be seen as strategic. ... Information on what customers purchase, how many times they contact customer service, and how long they linger on a given website can create an insightful narrative about buying habits and preferences.
  4. Dean, Kevin (2022-09-28). "An Open Letter to Marketers and Data Scientists". AnalyticsIQ. Retrieved 2023-10-02.
  5. 1 2 Shandrow, Kim Lachance (February 8, 2015). "10 Questions to Ask When Collecting Customer Data". Entrepreneur. Retrieved January 24, 2020.
  6. Rollins, Minna J. (Oct 2014). "Types of customer information collected about business customers". Customer information usage and its effect on seller company's customer performance in business-to-business markets – an empirical study (Report). Archived from the original on 12 Mar 2024 via ResearchGate.
  7. Chui, Michael; Hazan, Eric; Roberts, Roger; Singla, Alex; Smaje, Kate; Sukharevsky, Alex; Yee, Lareina; Zemmel, Rodney (June 14, 2023). "Economic potential of generative AI". McKinsey. Retrieved 2023-10-02.