Knowing your customers is critical for success, which is why every retailer should be using customer profiles to some degree. Customer profiles help you identify individual customer needs, compiling a wide array of customer data from demographics and location to purchasing history.

Every team in your business should be able to tap into the information gleaned from your customer profiles, assisting them in satisfying your customers and enriching experiences.

In this post we’ll take a deep dive into why you should start using customer profiles, and how you can deploy them to grow your business.

Increase customer engagement

Your customers desire personalized experiences, and through customer profiles, you can create them. For example, a marketing campaign that targets your customers’ preference towards replenishment purchases is going to earn higher engagement than a campaign that targets a more general segment of customers who don’t have any specific patterns of targetable behavior.

How to take action: A replenishment campaign centers around promoting previously purchased products to your customers after their supply runs out. Replenishment products can include things like skin care, wellness products, food and beverage, and beauty products. Identify the products that warrant replenishment and create a segment of the customers who purchased said products. Then, take a deeper look at the customer profiles that make up that segment, so you can understand more effective ways to reach them, like preferred channel and purchase frequency.

Reduce customer churn

Customer churn occurs when customers disengage from your brand over a period of time. Churn becomes problematic when retailers lose high-value customers due to lackluster customer experiences. Fortunately, you can use customer profiles to combat churn by turning new customers into loyal ones, and delighting your most loyal customers.

How to take action: Tap into the profiles of current customers and customers who churned from your brand to gain a deep understanding of your customer journey. Identify precisely when your customers churned and ideate what experiences might retain similar customers in the future. Additionally, there’s an opportunity to re-engage lapsed customers, using churned customers’ profiles to create impactful re-activation marketing.

Knowing your customer

Customer profiles serve as a critical tool in getting to know your customer. Having a unified understanding of your customers accessible across departments can go a long way in driving revenue and accelerating business growth.

How to take action: Break down siloed databases and improve how you capture zero- and first-party customer data so that customer profiles are accurate. Having a unified customer database accessible in a marketer-friendly platform can ensure customer profiles are accessible across teams. At the same time, prioritizing zero- and first-party customer data will ensure that your profiles accurately depict your customers.

Increase marketing ROI

Successful marketing campaigns are the ones that resonate with the target audience. Customer profiles help you refine your marketing strategy and messaging to a specific audience, generating higher returns and improving performance. Focusing your marketing strategy can also mean lower acquisition costs as you target specific prospective customer behaviors and attributes that are most likely to lead to acquiring the best customers.

How to take action: To increase marketing ROI, divide your customers into segments using profiles as a way to inform the segments you’re creating. Segment ideas include purchasing history, demographics, time to purchase, and relevant data points unique to your business. Once you have these segments created, push marketing campaigns that match their needs and behaviors, focusing on segments that are likely to generate the most value and engagement.

Lexer’s Customer Data and Experience Platform (CDXP) can help your business build, optimize, and deploy highly-detailed customer profiles that you can use to create enriched customer experiences. Built with busy retailers in mind, Lexer supports leading brands and retailers to drive sales growth through improved customer engagement.

This article was adapted from Lexer’s playbook, ‘How to increase engagement using customer profiles in a CDXP ’. If you liked this, you’ll probably be interested in the playbook as well. Click here to download the playbook.