In today’s modern times where consumers have multiple options to shop and learn more about a brand, businesses have to keep up with a lot — from developing and creating high-quality products, to staying relevant, to cultivating a positive brand reputation, and so much more. 

But one important yet often overlooked aspect is to thoroughly understand your customer.

The Value of Understanding Your Customers

Your customers are the bread and butter of your business. Whether you’re a B2C or B2B business, there’s a lot of value of understanding your target audience well:

• It helps you attract the right customers: Understanding the needs, wants, and pain points of your target audience is key in acquiring the right customers for your business. It also helps you develop your products and services even better. 
• It fosters customer loyalty and retention: Being able to understand your customers at a personal level sets the tone of your relationship with them. Having a positive customer relationship hugely contributes to their loyalty to your brand. In this way, you also reduce customer acquisition costs while also boosting your sales.
• It boosts sales and revenues: Brands that are customer-centric are found to be 60% more profitable than companies that don’t. Additionally, according to 73% of customers, great customer experience (CX) drives their buying decisions, and understanding and making them feel valued are two huge factors in delivering quality CX.

5 Simple Steps to Truly Understand Your Customers

The good news for brands is that there are myriads of tools available to help you gather data to understand your customers better. So how do you keep your customers satisfied while still keeping everything else together?

1. Apply intelligent customer engagement

One of the keys to better understand your customers is to gain and collect insight into their preferences, browsing/shopping behavior, and more. With this data, you can personalize your marketing approach and even individualize your engagement. 

Tools like Alpine IQ’s Intelligent Timing, for example, helps you identify the best times of the day when a certain customer is more than likely to engage and shop with your brand. Audience segmentation is also another great way to get to know your customers and help you identify their unique needs.

2. Leverage social media

Social media has become more than just a platform for brands to engage with customers. It has also evolved into a sales and customer service channel as well. 

It’s important for brands to leverage this since you can learn a great deal about a customer’s preferences by looking at their profiles alone or by directly interacting with them. Social media platforms also have built-in tools that can help you gain more insight about your customers.

3. Send customer surveys

Customer surveys are a great opportunity to learn more about your audience’s needs, wants, and issues.

The key here is to send surveys in the right context and to ask the right questions — for example, you can gain information about how you can improve your products/services when you send surveys after they contacted customer support. 

4. Deliver quality customer support

People in general desire to feel valued and be heard. As businesses, your role in the customer journey doesn’t end when a sale is completed — it must continue even after that, which is why it’s important to deliver quality after-sales customer support.

Around 66% of customers believe that valuing their time is the utmost factor in having an excellent online customer experience. Make it a point to resolve each concern in a timely manner while also making sure you understand their grievances and needs. This not only contributes to better customer experience; it also helps you understand your customers and gives you insight on how you can improve as a business.

5. Be consistent in customer communication

As we mentioned before, cultivating a good relationship with your customers is key. Knowing your customers and building rapport with them go hand in hand: when customers trust you, they engage more with your brand. The more engagement, the better you get to know them.

Consistency is crucial when it comes to communicating with your audiences. Whether it’s sending email newsletters, push notifications, survey requests, or responses to concerns, every effort you make has to have a regular yet flexible schedule as it sets customers’ expectations. 

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Understanding your customers thoroughly is one of the cornerstones of building a successful business. It not only helps in acquiring new customers; it also helps in customer loyalty,  retention, and boosting sales. 

A crucial point to remember is that knowing your customers isn’t just a one-off effort. As customers’ needs evolve over time, your brand must also be proactive in understanding these changing needs. 

Using the right tools is also key in helping you streamline your efforts. With Alpine IQ’s suite of marketing automation services, you can gather a multitude of customer data and insights to help you understand your audience better. Find out more by visiting https://alpineiq.com/. 

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