Uniform

Knowing your customer

By Stephen Ardern

Customer relationships hinge on maximising the valuable information that drives interaction, however, in spite of this, many companies struggle to take full advantage of the information they have, and acquiring the right data is even more difficult. Regardless of how difficult or expensive data acquisition is, it is an important aspect to growing a customer base, and a business.

How do you acquire good data that helps build a lasting customer relationship?

The days of buying databases in a consumer world are over. With the death of SPAM and ever more focus on data protection, buying random databases is very risky, it’s likely to be inaccurate and impossible to map against prospective customers. You could obtain data face-to-face; but this can also have its drawbacks. Firstly it’s very costly and secondly, it’s an extremely laborious process.

In the last two years, we have been working on a brand behaviour model that helps attract and retain the right customers for our clients. The model has a number of key principles that create a structure to develop effective and compelling communication and drive consumer engagement and loyalty. This in turn creates a relationship built on trust, and facilitates more opportunity to obtain vital customer information, willingly.

It is important to remember that data acquisition is a value exchange. Customers will only share essential information if they feel they’re getting something in return. A competition is a good exchange, because for most, you are only providing the chance to win and not the prize itself, so this limits the amount of expense incurred. This is hardly a new technique, but is an important step to get right when engaging with potential customers.

Once you have determined an applicable exchange, our brand behaviour model can help structure a campaign that is exciting and engaging to customers.

The key principles of this model are as follows:

1. Relevance – are you attracting the right people and in a relevant way?
2. Conversation – is it good enough to share?
3. Authentic – is the campaign creating an experience that is true to your brand?
4. Ownership – is there an opportunity to become part of the brand’s future?

The model provides the right structure to communicate and engage, but using the right platform is also essential. Our approach integrates online tools with social media, creating an experience that is exciting, whilst easy to interact with. This approach creates strong brand ambassadors for your business that help amplify the effects of any activity.

It is only through this level of engagement, and over time, that you can easily build up a strong customer database. Making the communications viral creates huge amounts of brand awareness and online buzz, whilst using online tools combined with social media gives unprecedented levels of customer information. This method has delivered consistent results in excess of 100,000 lines of data, for relatively low levels of expenditure and resource.

The outcome is a strong campaign that helps build your brand, create a unique and engaging experience and most importantly, acquires data to help you build lasting relationships with your customers.

Tweet