Businesses collect data in many ways, and they get it from different sources. In return, they learn more about their customers and the market in general. In fact, data-driven business decisions increase the profits of companies significantly. Data is paramount in creating an infographic for strategic planning and team brainstorming. By using data effectively, you can improve your customer satisfaction and performance. With all that said, this article will tackle collecting customer data the right way alongside the data types you can use for your business.
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Data
There are tons of ways to collect data from your market legally. You can do this through google forms, interviews, and surveys. However, the ones mentioned above are useful only when collecting qualitative data. This is because qualitative data answers the questions of why, how, and what. You can collect qualitative data through forms filled out by your website visitors, or customers with their feedback and personal details.
Quantitative data, on the other hand, has something to do with how many clicks you get on your ads or your landing page bounce rate. In hindsight, this data provides you with information about a range, quantity, or amount that pertains to your business and marketing activities. This is where your analytics do the work. You can get the best out of these analytics by outsourcing IT professionals that will integrate the right tools into your website and CRM.
The Types of Data You Can Collect
In this blog post, you will know more about some of the most popular ways companies collect data.
Attitudinal Data
In order to stay competitive in the business scene, companies are constantly seeking to improve. Thus, businesses collect data that helps them determine how desirable their offers are. For example, if a restaurant owner is interested in understanding customer wants and needs, he would do a survey. This allows the owner to collect customer data to understand his customer base.
If you have a click-and-mortar business, collecting attitudinal data is one strategic way to retain customers. In your CRM, for example, you will see the interactions of your potential and current customers with your products. This data will help you determine what your best-sellers are. You can also use the data in your order history for future upselling and recommendations.
There are ready-made CRM systems you can use through third-party integrations. But for best results, outsource an offshore IT development team that can create a CRM software design best-fitted for your business needs.
Attitudinal data works best with an effective CRM software. You can use this tool for email marketing and strategy planning to satisfy your customers better.
Behavioral Data
There are many types of data that are being recorded on the web, but one of the most important ones is behavioral data or data about user behavior. While it may not seem like a big deal, this type of data is vital for all business types, especially in the United States. Behavioral data pertains to the shopping frequency of your customers, or the time and date they usually purchase. This also includes the mouse movement of each visitor or customer you have on your website.
When someone accesses your website, your browser will send a request to the server for the location of their website files. This request will soon provide you with information about your visitor’s device, location, browser, and a lot of other data that can be used to track personal information. Also, the way they interact with their device will leave traces on the hard drive logged by their operating system. This information is also called behavioral data and can be used to identify your potential and current customers.
Behavioral data is information about a user’s online behavior. It can be used to target a specific audience for paid advertising purposes, for example. The behavioral data is based on a user’s online activity and can be either collected in real-time or stored for later use. This is quite similar to web analytics, but the main difference is that web analytics is mainly for marketing purposes, while behavioral data is for advertising purposes.
Engagement Data
The engagement data gathering procedure is used in marketing to determine how effective each marketing strategy is. It can be measured by a number of different factors in different ways. For example, if you were to engage someone on a social media platform like Twitter, you would want to measure the number of interactions you had with that person. This is usually measured by a retweet or a reply, or through a website, by the number of times that they click on it.
Have you ever wondered how many likes, comments and retweets your social media posts have? This data was once very difficult to gather, but now companies are providing it in a simple and timely fashion. Business marketing tools such as Facebook and WordPress provide you page insights to know which post gained the attention of your audience the most. Engagement data is a way for you to measure how your content is doing online. You will thoroughly see how many likes your content has, how many reactions it has, and how many comments and retweets it gained.
It is one of the most important metrics you can use to measure your followers’ interest in your brand. Do they like your new products? Are they impressed with your new services? Are they interested in your future plans? By tracking your engagement rates, you can find out.
Personal Data
Having the personal data of your website visitors, audiences, and customers is also crucial to give you a deeper understanding of your market. One of the most important data you can get from your market is their contact information—especially email addresses. For your lead generation strategies, building effective email lists begins in your data collection procedures.
To give you an idea, here are the ways you can get personal data about your target market:
- Purchased data from data brokers
- Use of a data searching software
- Information that your audience or customers directly give you
- Data indirectly acquired through order forms
Conclusion to Collecting Customer Data The Right Way
To wrap things up, collecting customer data the right way means knowing what types of data you can acquire first, and informing the other party of the data you wish to collect from them. It is also critical for you to get their consent before acquiring their personal information.
Without consent and through the data protection act, your business will be fined a substantial amount. Thus, you can optimize data research and collection as long as you abide by the data privacy laws. The acquisition of data that does not go against data security and laws is crucial to making it big in the business industry. A clear example of this is Facebook. It tracks down your activities on the platform and in exchange, it uses those data for Facebook advertising. Also, it asks for your consent through its terms of service and privacy policy. Data acquisition and its management are what made this social media platform stand out from the rest. You too can attract as many consumers as you want, by collecting customer data the right way.
