The most important piece of information is the bottom line for many business owners. You can consider yourself a successful business person if your revenues exceed expenses. It is also important to identify the most profitable customers and the best-selling items in a business. This data makes it easier to improve your marketing strategies and attract even more customers.
Good profits always attract more competition and profits may decrease as the market becomes saturated. For you to be a long term successful business person you need more than just a cost analysis. To achieve this you should have a comprehensive profile of consumer tastes and habits. Customer profiles allow you to identify golden opportunities! How do you build customer profiles relevant to your business niche? You can make assumptions based on readily available general data. Examples of such data includes:
- Old people prefer shopping online than walking around shops.
- Tourists don’t like to carry cash.
- Teenagers are increasingly loving video games.
The disadvantage of such information is that your competitors have access to the same information too. In order to be unique you should use your own internal payment data to develop accurate profiles for your specific target market.
Using Customer Payment Data to Increase Sales Volume.
With the introduction of technology in business environment you probably have your ecommerce or ERP software to support your payment process. Wealthy data points readily available from those software include:
- Location of shoppers in terms of countries and their IP addresses.
- Their device preferences such as android versus iPhone.
- Preferred Browsers such as Operamini versus Chrome.
- Preferred shopping hours.
From such kind of information you can focus on promoting sales and even giving offers from Fridays with attention focused on the area with most buyers. This is just one of the surface methods you can utilize customers payment data to get more sales.
Payment Integration and Customer Analytics.
By taking a look at all the payment processing reports it is possible to gather all of the information discussed above. You can automate customer analysis by integrating payments with business tools that are in use. Here is how:
- Synchronize payment processing with your accounting software to be able to identify best sellers, losers and high value customers.
- Integrate payments with your customer relationship management platform to show you how users interact with your business. You will be able to view their shopping preferences and preferred communication channels.
- This type of payment integration saves time and reduces operating costs and errors! You can use this information to build on your strengths, develop better products and adopt appealing advertising methods to target your market now that you know their preferences.
- Monitor the impact of your promotions.
Do not create discounts blindly without looking at your customer data. You need to find out if your promotions are creating traffic to your site. You can use social media, online ads and emails to refine your campaign strategy.