Here are the top 3 MUST DOs for preparing to run an online market research campaign to help your business sell more of its products and services to existing customers.
1. You MUST (no debate MUST) get your customers email address for your online marketing research. If you are planning on using the internet to promote and sell then without an email address you have limited scope for interaction.
2. You must find out what they bought from you. So go though your records and build a list of customer details against items bought. If you don’t have a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) don’t use this as an excuse – excel will do as a short stop. No excuses – build the list. This conventional market research is something that is tedious but needs done.
3. In that same list make sure it includes when they last bought from you. And how frequently they have bought. If that’s too hard to come up with then give them a score out of 10 – i.e. 10 is a great customer and just seems to keep buying. If they’ve only bought once, a long time ago and then complained give them a 1.
So easy enough to get the target audience set up and identified when they are already customers. But surely you’ll also want to target prospects who are not customers yet – that group always outnumbers existing customers.