For a business to be successful, it must know its audience. Collecting customer data is an essential part of this. When it comes to customer data, there are four important types that you should collect: basic data, interaction data, behavioural data, and attitudinal data.
Basic data includes things like name, contact details, gender, age, birthdate, ethnicity, occupation, IP address, and social media handles. The best way to collect this kind of data is to use physical and digital forms. This type of data is very useful for marketing purposes.
Interaction data relates to how customers interact with your business. This covers a variety of touchpoints but notably includes mostly digital interactions.
Customer interaction data includes: website visits, bounce rates, conversions, engagement with adverts, social media posts engagement, email engagement, and more. It also includes data on customer purchasing habits.
This data can be collected and analysed using website analytics, social media analytics, and similar platforms/software.
This data has some similarities with interaction data, but looks at ‘direct’ engagement. It can include: purchase history, abandoned website visits, subscription renewals and cancellations, order values, time spent on your website, and website visit heatmaps. This data can usually be collected during website visits.
The importance of data quality cannot be underestimated. To be considered ‘quality’, data should be reliable, accurate, complete, and consistent. When organisations use poor quality data to make decisions, it can lead to all sorts of problems.
If you feel that your business could benefit from the assistance of a data analysis company, specialists such as //shepper.com/ are able to offer advice, services, and solutions.
Attitudinal data is essentially opinions from customers. As it is not as easily defined and is non-numeric, it can be harder to process and analyse. These opinions can be about your business, your competitors, or external issues such as economic outlook.
Attitudinal data can include opinions gathered via online surveys, customer reviews, and focus groups.