How to Collect Your Customer Data

The “Science of Business”: Analysing customer data is crucial to know your next business’ move.

Day 8: The scientific approach

A debate has been raging in the marketing world for the past decade – is marketing an art, or a science?

On the art side of the argument, marketers say that it takes human creativity to connect to humans – which is true.

On the science side, marketers say that you need data to base your decisions on – also true.

I like how Sam Holzman put it in this Zoominfo post:

“Yes, an artist might know how to engage their audience emotionally. But, their efforts will be in vain if they can’t find their audience in the first place. A scientific marketer doesn’t rely on guesswork. Instead, they analyze customer data and construct comprehensive buyer personas made up of key traits and characteristics shared by their best customers. Guided by accurate data, marketers are guaranteed to identify who their target buyers are, where to find them, and how best to engage them.”

Now, whether you’re a creative or analytical person, you may err slightly to one side of the argument over the other. But as with most things in life, a healthy balance of both is probably the way to go.

 

 

But for the sake of ease, today we’re focusing on one side of the argument: science.

You may already be at a level where you’re starting to think about how to improve your service for your customers…

Or you might be launching a new product…

Either way, you want to know whether your decisions are the right ones for you and your customers.

This is why science is your friend. Opinions are fine, but facts are better. If you base your decisions on data, you can take the guesswork out of the process.

I’m going to share with you an uncommonly used, but immensely powerful ‘copy and paste’ technique that gives you a rock-solid indication of how successful a business move will be.


It starts with your customer data:

Don’t have any of these? Look at Amazon reviews of related books/products in your niche, competitor reviews, Reddit, Facebook groups and other similar forums where your customers hang out online, or check out tomorrow’s lesson on customer surveying (where we’ll be gathering some customer data) and come back to this.

Customer emails tell you what products or features customers will pay for, and why most of your customers churn.

Support requests & chats tell you how to fix problems with your service and make your operations more efficient.

Reviews and testimonials are great for getting copy you can use in marketing materials, and on your website.

FAQs tell you what doubts prospects have before giving you money, and how you can overcome them to make the sale.


What do we do with this?

  1. Research your customer emails, support requests and chat logs, reviews, testimonials, and FAQ.
  2. Copy snippets of what customers have said about your service/product, operations, customer relations, their lives, their likes, their dislikes… anything that stands out to you as important.
  3. Then make a copy (File > Make a copy) of this spreadsheet, and paste all the data in there.

We’ve inserted some example column titles, but you can categorize your data however it suits you.

Once you have this spreadsheet properly set up, you (or your VA) can simply add customer data whenever you receive any. So you have a data set that grows as you grow!

Why do you need this?

Just like a scientist looks for data to build a hypothesis, you will use this data to build a hypothesis for your next business move!

It takes out the guesswork and prevents you from wasting time and money on new products or features, or even marketing ventures (we’ll talk more about this in the next lesson) that don’t “move the needle”.

That’s all for this lesson.