For restaurant and retail owners and operators, there are plenty of ways in which to collect customer profile data – official U.S. data sources, market research companies, WiFi data collection, or even DIY surveys and questionnaires.
No matter how your data is collected, there are tools available today to help you take the customer information you’ve gathered and use it to effectively drive positive ROI and improve operations.
Some of these tools will collect much more detailed data for you, in real time, using WiFi marketing technology – which further reduces your data collection costs and gives you a much larger sample size of your actual customers.
Knowing your different customer segments and how each of these groups behave can allow you to create much more creative and effective online campaigns for each of them on your website, your mobile app, and various online advertising channels, such as Google or Facebook. It means knowing where they are online and offline, and appealing to their interests when and where it is most convenient for them, allowing you to focus on the most effective marketing channels.
Plus, you’ll gain a deeper understanding into what kind of information appeals to them and what questions and pain points they have.
This allows you to create high-quality, informational and useful content for your website, social media channels, email campaigns and offline marketing efforts. It can also give you great insight as to how you might optimize your brand presence through testing.
You can create more visually and intellectually appealing creative not only for your digital efforts, but for your point of sale marketing as well. For instance, you can provide more effective or engaging merchandise or signage to help you increase customer PPA at the POS itself, including suggestive selling by your employees.
Customer profile data can give you the ability to execute things you may not have even thought about, such as more effectively selecting the most profitable location for a new restaurant or store. It can help you better manage purchasing and staffing, and it can help you make much better decisions on special events and promotions.
WiFi Triggered Marketing
WiFi analytics and marketing platforms are solutions that can passively collect customer data for you and create the detailed customer profiles necessary to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. But that’s just the beginning.
As you build these customer profiles, WiFi marketing tools allow you to set up one-time, regularly-scheduled, and behavior-triggered marketing campaigns. You instantly gain the ability to perform marketing in real time, based on actual customer demographic and behavior data.
Here are examples of a few triggered campaigns you can implement immediately:
- Birthday – When you know a customer’s birthday, you can send an offer or promotion a few days prior. Of course, you should still consider all of the other data points in their profile, such as age, gender and personal interests. The goal is to bring that person back to your physical location, redeem your offer, spend more money, and become more loyal.
- Come Back Soon – Another tactic is to send a marketing message to a customer after they have left your place of business. When they leave your store, the tool waits a pre-configured time period (minutes, hours, days) and sends them a thank you message and offers them an incentive to come back.
- Give us a Rating – Using the same trigger as the ‘Come Back Soon’ example, you could send a message to a customer who has recently visited your place of business and ask them to rate their experience. If you are aware of the customer demographic and purchase decisions, and their rating is better than average, you can offer a compelling offer to get them to write a review on Yelp, Google, or any other ratings website.
You can also send triggered messages based on things like milestones, loyalty, registration, at-risk potential, good or bad customer ratings, and more. You may also send one-off messages and regularly scheduled messages to any or all of your customer segments.
Testing and Measuring Results
Of course, none of this will be as effective if you have no way to accurately measure the results of your efforts. You need to make sure that the solution you’re using provides detailed and comprehensive reporting features, and the ability to track testing campaigns.
It can be tempting to use your own intuition to predict what will make people come into your restaurant or visit your store, but it’s vital to understand that customer perceptions, experiences and likes/dislikes are limitless. Basing marketing decisions off one person’s “feeling” can be detrimental to your business.
You also need to be able to attribute customer behavior to specific channels and campaigns. For instance, you want to distinguish if a customer came into your location because of an advertisement they saw online, or through an email message, or from a radio commercial. Additionally, you want to know which particular marketing message they responded to, and to which customer segment(s) they belong.
This will allow you to optimize your marketing messages based on accurate, tangible data, and strive for continuous improvement. If you’re not measuring your marketing campaigns and ROI at this level of detail, you will not know for sure if what you are doing is helping or hurting your business.
You want to continuously test your marketing messages. Without testing, you’re always leaving potential revenue on the table.
Just make sure that the tools you are using can give you the accurate reports and KPIs required to determine which messages are working better than others. And always allow plenty of time to give yourself a large enough sample size to confidently determine your winners – the more, the better.
In addition, you can use these KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your staffing, purchasing, and other managerial issues.
Get a Head Start On Your Competition
Using a WiFi analytics and marketing platform to collect customer profiles can make a huge difference for your business when you use them effectively.
But it can also work for your competition!
Now is the time to move into the future of customer profiling and consumer marketing to leverage a jump-start on other savvy marketers.
The concept is easy to master and can yield huge returns. Successful business owners not only know their business, they understand the differences in their customers and they provide specific, engaging messaging that addresses those differences.
Increasing customer frequency and spend, building customer loyalty, increasing your bottom line, staying ahead of competition and striving for continuous improvement – all are potent and effective ingredients for restaurant and retail business success. With the amount of competition out there, customer profiling can be one of the easiest methods of gaining a strong competitive advantage and ensuring lasting success.
If you’d like to learn more, take a look at our free guide: Understanding the Power of Customer Profiles.
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