There’s more to customer data than just names and emails. When it comes to customers interacting with your brand, be it through social media or browsing your website, you must understand the types of customer data you’re collecting and how you can leverage it for the benefit of your business.
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Why is customer data important?
To successfully market and run your business, you’ve got to know your audience.
Who are they? What are their interests? How about buying habits? This information and more can be found through the collection of different types of customer data.
By collecting customer data, you can gain better insight into who your audience is to create better-informed marketing campaigns that appeal to your target audience and drive more revenue for your business.
Types of customer data
There are four main types of customer data to look out for:
Each of these types of customer data brings value to your business and shouldn’t be overlooked. Read on to learn more about these four types, as well as some examples of customer data and tips on how you can start collecting them today.
1. Basic or identity data
Basic, or identity data, is just that—it’s the basic information you gather from customers that identifies them as unique individuals.
Basic customer data includes a customer’s:
Name
Postal and email address
Gender identity
Phone number
Age and birthday
Race and ethnicity
Other types of basic customer data include things like a customer’s work industry and occupation, income, IP address, and social media handles.
Basic customer data is useful for businesses and marketers because it helps to create buyer personas and get a clearer picture of the demographics your business is appealing to.
How to collect basic customer data
Collecting basic customer data is possible through the forms your customers fill out on your website, like newsletter subscriptions, contact forms, account sign-ups, and purchases.
With a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Nutshell, you can collect, organize, store, and centralize all your customer’s unique identity data for quick and easy access and analysis at any time.
2. Interaction or engagement data
Interaction, or engagement data, refers to data related to how your customers interact with your business across various touchpoints. Rather than looking at your audience members individually, engagement data looks at your audience as a whole.
Customer engagement and interaction data comes in the form of:
Website visits
Click-through rates (CTR)
Bounce rates
Conversions
Ad engagement, like reach, clicks, and interactions
Social media posts and video engagement, including likes, comments, and shares
Email engagement, like clicks, forwards, and bounce rates
This data also comes from product or service information like customer purchasing habits and overall popularity.
Customer interaction data is important for understanding the attitudes and habits of your target audience. With it, you can create well-informed marketing campaigns that better appeal to your audience.
How to collect customer interaction data
You can collect customer interaction data in a few different ways. The first is by looking at your website’s analytics page. There you can find information like views, CTR, and bounce rate. From your website’s analytics, you can also find interaction data related to your products and services.
You can also collect customer interaction data from your paid marketing and social media campaigns. Social media platforms that allow advertising include post analytics so you can see exactly who liked your post, where they’re using the platform, and how often your post or ad was seen by users.
When you run campaigns like paid search ads, you’ll have access to reports and analytics dashboards that give you the rundown on how well your ads are performing. You see everything from the number of clicks your ads earned to where your ads appeared.
With Nutshell, you can analyze all your customer interaction data to see exactly how your leads interact with your website, social media posts, and team members.
Behavioral customer data is similar to customer interaction data but a little more defined. Behavioral data looks at a customer’s direct engagement with your business. Depending on the industry you’re in, interaction and behavioral data can sometimes be combined.
Behavioral customer data includes:
Purchase history
Abandoned shopping carts
Subscription renewals and cancellations
Product order values
User duration on your site
Heat maps for mouse movement data like clicks and scrolling
How to collect behavioral customer data
Like customer interaction data, you can collect behavioral data straight from your website by looking at transactional information for products and individual user behavior.
You can also look at email interactions to collect behavioral data like newsletter subscribers and unsubscribers.
You don’t have to sift through all this data alone, though. With Nutshell, you can track how your leads are moving through your pipeline. You’ll see everything from where leads drop in (and out) of your sales funnel, the products they purchase, and their purchase history.
4. Attitudinal data
Last but not least is attitudinal data. Attitudinal data is comprised of first-hand opinions from customers on your business, services, and products. Unlike the previous three types of customer data, attitudinal data is a bit harder to process.
Basic, interaction, and behavioral data include hard numbers that can’t really be disputed—these data points are clearly stated for you to interpret. Attitudinal data, on the other hand, is a bit different.
Rather than numbers, attitudinal data consists of:
Attitudinal data is a bit trickier to process because not every review is written the same. Some customers may be extremely detailed with their reviews and survey responses, while others keep it short and to the point.
As a business owner, marketer, or customer service representative, it’s your job to extract the important information from these customer reviews and feedback responses and turn them into valuable, actionable data.
How to collect attitudinal customer data
As you can probably guess, attitudinal data is collected from the surveys and feedback forms you send out to your customers. You can also extract attitudinal data from the interactions you have with your customers when you work with them in your store or business.
While attitudinal data doesn’t really involve specific data points like other customer-related data types, it’s still just as important to collect and analyze. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers and clients for feedback. Not only does it inform you of people’s opinions of your brand, but it helps identify areas of improvement.
Nutshell’s CRM features a Form Builder tool so you can create and distribute them for data and feedback collection. You can also leverage Nutshell’s email automation to send emails to customers asking them to fill out a survey, leave a review, or add any other feedback on their experience.
Expertly manage your customer data with Nutshell’s CRM software
Collecting customer data is one thing, but managing it all is another. With Nutshell’s all-in-one CRM, though, it’s easy.
Nutshell is a sales and marketing CRM platform that centralizes your customer data so it’s all in one place and makes it easier for you to manage your business’s leads so you can close more deals. With features like sales automation, pipeline management, and advanced reporting and analytics, you can manage the customer-facing side of your business with no headaches.
