Monday, October 23, 2006

Shopping Cart Program Guide: How To Do Customer Profiling

Your shopping cart program should come with filtering tools. These can be invaluable for defining segments of your customer base with special interests or needs.

Rather than taking the buck shot approach, just spraying everyone and everything with the same advertising message, you can use the rifle shot approach, precision targeting for maximum results.

Here are two suggestions for building your own customer profiles:

1. Define customer segments by email address

How many of your customers have AOL email addresses? Why not do a check. In your shopping cart program search interface you should be able to search your client base by email address and also email domain. Just putting “aol.com” in the search field will show up all your AOL clients.

How is this helpful? Because AOL is largely a consumer based ISP. If you are selling business-to-business you may need to change your approach somewhat when you broadcast or email this section of your client base as their outlook and needs will be different.

2. Define customer segments by State or Country

Your shopping cart program should be able to search for customers by state or country.

Getting to know the demographics of various states can help you in developing your promotions. Government web sites often provide much statistical information which can help you identify a need and fill it.

This information is worth its weight in gold. By educating yourself on customer profile information and then using the filtering mechanisms in your shopping cart program, your advertising results will be taken to a new level.

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