How to Enrich Customer Data Through Your Website

In our previous blog post, 3 Ways to Capture Data Without Annoying Your Website Visitors, we discussed how certain data capture methods could help you make the most of your website traffic by capturing unknown visitors.

Here’s a quick recap:

• Use well-timed popups in order to target the visitor at the exact time that they have already received value from your content and are less likely to get annoying by it.
• Implement continuously-capturing popups that allow you to persistently ask for data and when dismissed will shrink into something less obvious.
• Use intent-triggered popups to inject a more urgent message if the customer has not provided information up to a critical point. Hook them before they leave your site.

This time around, we’ll take a look at using those same methods to enrich customer data and get explicit information from your users. Data capture methods like popups, persistent devices, and contextual content areas offer marketers the real estate to ask simple questions in order to give insight into a user without creating a barrier to conversion. Not only does this get you more details about prospects and customers, but it also offers insights into what’s working and what isn’t (remember, volume is key in any testing).

According to Business 2 Community, “Metrics are great, but they do not necessarily explain why a customer chooses your brand over another. To find out this valuable information, marketers need to start exploring the motivation behind customer behavior instead of strictly reading metrics that only tell part of the story.”

First things first, these methods can be used alongside your existing data capture campaigns as they will be targeted to visitors who have already been identified and who have already given marketing permission – just to ensure we’re on the right side of the GDPR doors.

Enrich Your Customer Data By Asking Questions

To uncover these insights and determine the motivations of buyers, you need to reach out and collect feedback directly from your customers. Determine how and why they buy and use your product or service. You need to determine customers’ feelings in order to understand the connection between buyer and brand.

“Surveys are a great way to reach a large audience and gain valuable feedback about your brand, new products, services, support, and more,” Business 2 Community also states. You can embed these surveys into your popups, so you can gather more than just a visitor’s name and email address.

Asking simple questions, like:

• Who are you buying for?
• What are your favorite products?
• How often do you buy this item?
• What age group are you in?
• How do you perceive our brand?
• Etc.

The answers to these questions will provide detailed insights into consumers’ wants and needs. This allows you to tailor your marketing strategy even more – specifically to your key audiences. You can also tailor the surveys to these different target audiences to learn how each group of customers differs.

Imagine you are a retailer that sells several different brands. You could segment for one-time buyers, who have bought from you once but not yet a second time. When they visit your website, you could serve them with a popup that asks them to pick what their favorite brands are. You could then easily tailor any following communications, whether through your website or a different marketing channel, to include content featuring those specific retail brands. Remember, explicit information used in a timely fashion combined with the right content is extremely powerful.

However, customer insights are not always easy to gather because of their emotional nature. You need to collaborate with the consumer and deepen the relationship with them in order to find out what their motivations are. Besides surveys, this can be done through focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, communities etc. Ask yourself whether your sales and marketing strategy resonates with what consumers are telling you. Once you uncover what they’re thinking, you can effectively strategize to acquire new leads and keep current customers coming back.

Interested in implementing these techniques? These data capture methods are possible with Mapp, through our partnership with Fresh Relevance.