Camila Casarotto
Jan 6, 22 | 9 min read
customer database
Reading time: 7 minutes
Today's marketing leverages the power of big data to better understand consumers and create better strategies for them. Thousands of data points are generated and collected as marketing tools follow customers' steps on the Internet. To manage this information and use it to their advantage, companies must know how to build a database efficiently .
This database provides information on the profile of customers, their preferences, purchase history, and other strategic information for the brand.
In this article, you will better understand how to build a customer database and why it is important to do so in order to achieve better marketing results. Join us and find out all about it!
What is a customer database?
What is the importance of having a customer database?
What should a customer database look like?
How to build a customer database?
Main strategies for data collection
What is a customer database?
A customer database is a collection of structured tunisia email address data about the profile, interests and behaviors of consumers who relate to a brand. In English it is known as Customer Database or Customer Data Platform.
This is some of the information that may be included in a customer database:
Contact information: name, address, telephone number, email, etc.
Demographic data: age, gender, marital status, income, family composition, etc.
Browsing behavior: pages visited, forms completed, content downloaded, etc.
Purchasing behavior: recent purchases, preferences by product categories, monthly expenses, stage of the purchasing journey, etc.
Business data (for B2B clients): sector of activity, number of employees, annual revenue, etc.
This information can be gathered in a simple spreadsheet, but it is ideally managed in a CRM (customer relationship management) platform , which offers greater efficiency, agility and marketing automation resources .
In this way, customer data can be used for business decision-making, creating better strategies and automating consumer relationships.
What is the importance of having a customer database?
A customer database serves as the basis for data driven marketing strategies , which are based on information about the public and the market for decision making and strategy planning .
The database captures information about the reality of consumers, which prevents decisions from being made based on assumptions. Thus, marketing becomes much more accurate and runs fewer risks.
In addition, this data helps brands understand their consumers better . It is possible to define the target audience and develop the buyer persona more precisely so that marketing can communicate better with consumers.
The customer database is also essential for marketing automation .
Data feeds automation tools, which create automated tasks, such as sending email marketing and creating personalized e-commerce showcases. In this way, it is possible to scale customer relationship actions with greater efficiency and personalization.
In addition to marketing, the customer database also serves sales and customer service teams.
Salespeople have rich information to approach leads and prospects in a more informed way, in order to analyze their needs and deliver the solutions they need.
Meanwhile, customer service has easily accessible information about the customer's latest purchases and interactions, so that they can offer fast and efficient support .
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What should a customer database look like?
A customer database can be made up of information from different sources, such as online questionnaires and social media tools. The important thing is to concentrate this data in a single tool, so that it is agile and functional for the brand's strategies.
For the database to fulfill its function in company management, it needs to have some essential characteristics. We have listed the main ones here:
Access to data must be simple and agile, on any device.
Data must be reliable, up-to-date, protected and backed up.
The platform must capture data from different sources, automatically.
The platform must allow data to be linked, but also to be analysed independently.
The platform should offer flexibility to organize data according to the company's needs.
The platform must have good processing capacity to make data available in real time.
The platform should be scalable, to encompass more customer data as the company grows.
How to build a customer database?
A good database is the raw material for marketing campaigns and customer relations. That's why it's important to know how to build an efficient customer database. Below you'll find some tips on how to do it.
