4 simple ways small businesses can use data to build better customer relationships

In a world where customers are bombarded across every possible channel with brand messages, targeting is more important than ever before. Small businesses need to be able to make their campaigns feel relevant and personal in order to keep up, but the processes involved – collecting, organizing and interpreting customer data to make it actionable – are often intimidating to small businesses and solo entrepreneurs with limited time and resources.

Collecting, organizing and learning from your customer data is critical no matter how large your team is or what stage of growth you’re in. In fact, there’s no better time to consider your processes for data than when you’re just starting out. And getting started with basic strategies for building customer relationships doesn’t have to be difficult – there are some simple steps you can take to save yourself a lot of time as your business grows and scales.

From the moment you start your business and establish an online presence, you should be laying the groundwork for effective CRM strategies. This includes: establishing a single-source of truth for your customer data, being thoughtful and organized about how you collect information and setting up the right processes to interpret that data and put it to work for your marketing. Here are some actionable steps (with examples) to take now:

• Collect: Make sure you’re set up to onboard people who want to be marketed to. Whether you’re interacting online or in person, you should be collecting as many insights as possible (for example, adding a pop-up form to your website to capture visitors, or asking people about their specific interests when they sign up for your email list in store) and consolidating them so you can use them to market.
• Organize: Once you have this data, make sure you’re organizing it in a way that will give you a complete picture of your customer, and make it easy to access the insights that are most important for your business to know. Creating a system where you can easily sort your contacts based on shared traits – such as geography, purchase behaviors or engagement levels – will make it much easier to target the right people with the right message.
• Find insights: Find patterns in data that can spark new ideas for your marketing. For example, the realization that your most actively engaged customers are in the Pacific Northwest could lead to a themed campaign targeting this audience, a plan for a pop-up shop in that location or even just help you plan your email sends based on that time zone.
• Take action: Turn insights into action, and automate to save time. As you learn more about your audience and what works for engaging them, make sure you’re making these insights scalable by setting up automations to trigger personalized messages based on different demographic or behavioral data.

Doing this right won’t just result in more personalized marketing campaigns and stronger, more loyal customer relationships – it will also help you be smart about where you focus your budget and resources as you continue to grow.