You’ve set up the perfect Shopify store. It is complete with key must-have features for eCommerces sites. Your inventory is better than your competitors’. You’ve checked out all these essentials. That’s great!
What’s next? You need to understand your customers – what they want and like on your site so that you can start marketing to them. If you skip this step of understanding your customers, you’d end marketing everything to everyone. The result: a waste of your time and resources.
In other words, how will you offer or market something to customers if you don’t know them? That’s why it’s important to create a customer profile.
What is a customer profile?
A customer profile is a description of your customers. Customer profiles can include attributes such as customers’ purchasing behavior, challenges, psychographic and demographic details, among others, with the intent to target them in your marketing campaigns. You can gather these attributes about customers from different sources.
Here’s an example of a customer profile:
Benefits of eCommmerce customer profiles
- It enables you to identify customers that are better fits for your products
- It can help you offer the right product to the right customer
- It can help you run targeted and personalized marketing campaigns
- It can help you lower the cost of customer acquisition
- It can help you serve your customers better
- It can help you reduce customer churn rate
The best methods to create customer profiles
Creating customer profiles has more benefits than one; from giving businesses direction into their target markets and potential markets, it also holds the information you require to double your revenue. This includes understanding different target markets, individual purchase behaviours and what you can sell to them. Let’s take a detailed look into how you can unlock this data from customer profiles for your Shopify ecommerce business:
Analyze data from past orders
When customers buy products from eCommerce stores, most sites store the information in the ‘order history’ section. This section is most commonly a part of the customer account page. Past orders information can offer deep insights about your customers. Here are some of the insights you can gather:
- You can know what items customers bought
- You can get insights about items customers like
- The specific days or dates when customers shop more
- Intervals at which customers shop
- Their likes, tastes, interests, etc.
The above are some insights of many more that you can gain from the ‘order history’ section.
And here’s what you can do with this information:
- Now you know what your customers like to buy from your site, when, how often, and other details such as style, color, etc. You can use this data to create customer profiles
- Based on customer profiles of individual customers, you can create segments of different types of customers
- You can then create personalized campaigns to target these customers
- For example, you can offer discounts on products to customers during a period of slow sales on your site
Utilize customer account page data
The customer account page of eCommerce sites is a goldmine of data. It stores all information of customers. From their address to payment details to past orders, to wishlist, and recently viewed products – this page is the go-to page for all information. Whether it’s the customer who seeks information or your marketing team, the customer account is the go-to page.
The customer account page can have different types of features that you offer to customers such as wishlist, recently viewed products, store credits, reorder, etc. Moreover, it has other important information, too. Think exchange and returns policy, FAQs, etc. This page can also help you gain information on what all topics and products the customers browsed.
Here’s an example of Amazon’s customer account page:
This page can help you understand customer behavior and provide psychographic data of customers that can be utilized to create customer profiles.
As you gather customer data by analyzing information from the different features and activities of your customers, you can contextualize that data with the help of data from the customer account. Wondering how to do it? Here are some actionable ways:
- Create a detailed picture of your customers – what are they doing, on which page, for how long
- Try to understand their needs and challenges to get a sense of what your customers want
- You can take it a step further by asking for feedback at every step of their customer journey, after every activity they engage in
- Match the customers activities on different features and sections of your website with the final action – conversion. This can help you understand what your customers liked or didn’t like
- Every action of your customers can reveal who they are and what they’re interested in
Use data from the wishlist section
The wishlist feature of eCommerce sites enables shoppers to save items that they are interested in, but may not want to buy right away. In such a case, they can simply add/save the item to the wishlist section and purchase it later.
This section can help marketers gain a lot of information about customers. For example, their buying intent, their likes, interests, etc. Based on this information, marketers can create marketing campaigns to target customers. Here are some ideas for marketing campaigns:
- Offer discounts on items added to their wishlist to motivate them to make purchases
- Market similar items to them to upsell
- Market other products from the site to cross-sell
Collect feedback and conduct surveys
When you want to dive deeper into your customers’ likes, dislikes, and interests, it’s time to bring in feedback and surveys. When you’re trying to create customer profiles, it’s easy to start by gathering data from their activities – purchasing and browsing – on your site. These can give you basic information about your customers.
But what if you want to know them better? One of the best ways to get to know customers at a deeper level is to ask your customers themselves. How? Through feedback and surveys.
By conducting feedback and surveys, you can ask customers specific questions to gain insights on defined matters. Collecting feedback and getting customers to fill surveys are the best methods to build customer profiles, because they help you go deeper into the customers’ psychology.
Make use of social media
All different communication channels that you use for your business can offer different insights about your customers. Social media channels are not just for entertainment. They can offer great value to your business if you use these platforms well. Some ways to gain insights from social media:
- Keep track of how often customers engage with your posts?
- Their likes, shares, comments, etc.
- What kind of content do they like and engage with?
- Which segment of your customers engage with what kinds of posts?
- Are your customers talking about or sharing about your brand on social media?
- What are they saying about your brand?
The information gathered from the above can help you add information to your customer profiles and know your customers better.
Dig through the internet
Your customers are all over the internet. They might be using different platforms to find the best products. They might be referring to review sites too. Moreover, they might also be talking about your brand on various sites. You can make use of social listening tools to get a better understanding of what your customers are interested in.
Hence, a good way to gain deeper insights about your customers is to look at what they’re saying about you or about your competitors on other platforms and sites. Here’s what you can do:
- Pay attention to what your customers are saying about your brand on different sites
- Look for your customers on review websites and the reviews they write about your brand or other brands
- Have your customers left comments on blogs?
- Are your customers interacting on your competitors’ social media platforms?
Keep reviewing and updating customer profiles
Your customers are not going to remain the same. They will keep changing. And so should the customer profiles. To keep abreast with your customers, you have to consistently keep analyzing your customers behavior. One of the best ways to do that is to start it from your customer account page.
Keep a track of your customers through their customer account on your Shopify store. This page will give you all the information you need about them – what they’re buying, changes in their purchase patterns, activities and features they engage more with over time, etc.
All this information can help you update the customer profile from time-to-time. Updated customer profiles can help you stay on top of your marketing game. You can target customers based on their changing needs, likes, and preferences. One of the best strategies in marketing is to consistently keep updating information.
Use a customer account page app
It’s impossible to create customer profiles manually, especially if your business is expanding and scaling. Besides, with smart customer account page apps and tools available online, there’s no need to go through the tedious task of doing things manually.
To create customer profiles, you can make use of a good customer account app such as Flits.
Flits customer account tool offers add-on features such as wishlist, recently viewed products, store credits, etc. These features help engage customers on your customer account page and make their shopping experience better. Data and insights gathered from these sections can help brands create better customer profiles.
Have you created a customer profile for your Shopify store?
Let’s do a quick recap of what we discussed above – from looking into customers’ order history and wishlist to their behavior and activities on your Shopify site – you can gain different types of insights into your customers from different sections and platforms.
To get started, you need a good Shopify customer account app.
Ready to tap into the different types of customer profiles for your ecommerce business?
Install Flits customer account app on your Shopify site today!
