Highlights:
- Small businesses must go beyond gut feelings when it comes to understanding customers
- Customer engagement and marketing don’t have to be difficult and time-consuming
- 3 questions that help identify key patterns in customer behavior
Small business owners often assume that customer engagement and marketing only apply to larger companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Small businesses’ competitive advantages lie specifically in creating and marketing a unique customer experience. With a better understanding of who your customers are and why they spend money with your business, you can better serve them and attract more people like them.
Small business owners spend a lot of one-on-one time with customers, so it’s easy to rely on gut instinct for understanding customers. Intuition is good, but hard facts are better. Married with intuition, hard data paints a truer picture of customer behavior and tendencies so you can remove the guesswork and really learn what makes customers tick.
To help you hone in on the right information, here are some questions to ask about your business:
- Who are your best customers? Your best, most loyal customers are more valuable to your business than infrequent or new ones. Research shows that you have a greater chance (60-70%) of selling to a current customer than to a prospect (5-20%). Your best customers are the ones who’ve identified the “jobs” that your products or services are doing better than competing businesses. Identifying who these premium customers are and delivering what they want is better than trying to be all things to all people.
- What are their buying habits? Take a little time to understand how your customers spend money in general. Pinpointing and understanding your customers’ spending patterns and shopping tendencies can help you build a much more strategic marketing plan to attract more customers and increase sales. It also helps you identify new opportunities to serve unmet customer needs and increase incremental revenue.
- What influences their decision to spend money with your business? Once you identify general spending patterns, look for trends in how your best customers spend money with your business specifically. Both internal influences (the consumer’s own desires and preferences) and external ones (everything from advertising to local market and competitive trends) can affect purchasing decisions. Uncovering the buying triggers for your top patrons will help you improve customer satisfaction and make more money with less effort.
Beyond asking these important questions, small businesses need a way to access key customer information without adding layers of complexity to the business. Womply’s analytics suite gives you a 360-degree view of your customers, so that you can have a much easier time identifying and servicing customers who visit frequently or spend more with you. With Womply, you can:
- Easily see trends in your company’s sales revenue and identify patterns in customer spending and loyalty.
- Quickly identify your best customers to get to know their spending habits and build custom profiles.
- Augment your customer information with anonymized transaction data from other local businesses to give you a better view of customer behavior in your market.
Womply also offers customer summaries so that you can see exactly how your customers’ behavior impacts your bottom line, and the capability to visualize spend by neighborhood to know where your customers live and shop. Womply can help you start taking advantage of these powerful analytics tools to reach your business goals. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!