Collect Customer Data, for More Than Just SMS/Email Marketing
If there’s one thing I’d tell you now, it would be not to waste your valuable time and hard-earned money on acquiring paid Facebook Fans. It’s time you worked on building your own customer contact base.
Don’t believe me yet? Ask from the experts!
Now see…
You spend a lot of time, effort and money as well… What for? Getting a 5 digit, or 6 digits fan base to your Facebook page. But did you know that Facebook changes their algorithms over time which minimizes the traffic to your fanpage? Having a large number of fans doesn’t mean that you will have a high conversion on sales or page visits. Still, you have to pay for ads and boost every post to get real conversion.
So let me give you a tip! Start building your subscriber/customer list now itself. Collect customer data!
“But I hate SMS/Email Marketing?”
Well then you shouldn’t! People still love to get SMS/Email alerts from the brands they love. SMS/emails give a high return on investment compared to your budget for social media advertising because they reach the people who already know about your brand.
But make sure you don’t spam your SMS/Email content, make it relevant to your customers by identifying different segments of your customer base. Send a “we missed you” discount campaign to the clients who have not shown up at your business for the last 60 days, “new arrivals at store” reminders to your most loyal customers. Don’t forget to give them an option to unsubscribe from your marketing messages anytime.
Find Your Existing Customers on Social Media!
Collecting customer data is not just for SMS/email marketing anymore. You can do a lot more with the collected data.
Do you know where your customers and prospects spend time online? Recent research studies show that an average Internet user spends two hours per day on social networks and messaging services. And you can show your products and services to your existing customers on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat etc. These social media networks allow you to upload your customer/subscriber list with email addresses or mobile numbers and create an audience of your existing customers called custom audiences. Custom audiences compare your data, basically with the mobile number/email, to help you find the audience of people you know on those social networks. With our experiments we found out that at least 60% — 80% of your customers is on social media with same mobile number/email.
So, don’t worry if your customer response is comparably lower for SMS/email marketing, you can still target them on their favourites social media channels. In this manner, you can always store your brand name in your customer’s mind.
Understand your customers, get more insights about your target audience
Most of the time, your social media ad target audience is based on a hypothesis. And it’s the very reason why you end up with broad audiences and less conversion. If you collect only name and mobile number/email as your customer data, their demographics would be obscure. But, tools like Facebook Audience Insights help you to understand your customers better. Once you create a custom audience using your existing data, you can find out details like their location, age categories, job titles, educational levels and many more valuable insights. And this helps you to come up with better insights to target your ads.
Find Customers Similar to Your Existing Customers
Facebook and many other social media networks offer social media marketers the opportunity to expand their reach from the aforementioned custom audiences to similar people online; the theory being that someone of a similar age, gender, location, and a set of interests as one of your best customers is more likely to purchase or consume your services than your average Internet user.
Whether you’re modeling lookalikes after repeat purchasers, your loyalty program members, or fans of your business page on social media, this approach takes the guesswork out of targeting for user acquisition, leading to increased revenue.
So, sit down with your team over the next week and go through how to collect customer data. If you find your database a bit incomplete then get your staff to update it as much as they can. Don’t forget to promise your customers some amazing offers when collecting their data. And never forget this — “don’t ever spam your customers”. Be smart with your customer data.
Happy data collecting!
