Pain Relief
PAIN RELIEF: Capturing Customer Data
- 13th October
- Martin Newman 15
Everything I read about best practice says I shouldn’t make my customers register before purchasing, but if that is the norm, what other ways do you suggest to build a quality database?
Everything I read about best practice says I shouldn’t make my customers register before purchasing, but if that is the norm, what other ways do you suggest to build a quality database?
The best way to drive conversion but still capture a good percentage of customers’ details and to build your database is to offer a guest checkout (In addition to the full registration process) – and to then offer the customer who opted for the guest checkout a simple checkbox at the end of the checkout to ‘set up an account’ and the system feeds all of the previous information entered and populates the account details.
This way, customers don’t feel in any way pressured into registering, which it what drives abandonment in the first place. Once a customer has already provided their details, as long as it’s a simple process to sign up/register at the end of the journey, they’ll be more inclined to do so.
You can also communicate the benefits of signing up/registering at various stages of the checkout including: order tracking, order history, re-order capability, offers and incentives, first access to sale merchandise and/or new products and so on.
Aside from that, data can be captured on the homepage of your site by having an email newsletter sign up box
Don’t ask for too much information from the customer at this stage, otherwise they won’t bother signing up. Just take an email address. Then as you build the relationship with the customer, you can start to request additional information but maybe with an incentive built in to encourage them to provide more details – and of course you can also add an incentive to email sign up in the first place, with an offer of free delivery or a discount off their first purchase.
There is also the option of using search engine marketing, and in particular PPC, to drive users to a landing page that encourages them to provide their data in return for an incentive similar to those mentioned above, or to enter a competition.
Finally, if you’re a multichannel retailer, there are opportunities to drive data capture across different channels. For example, it’s notoriously difficult to get store customers to give your their data at the point of sale. So you could give them an incentive to register online in their own time for an incentive or offer they could redeem in a channel of choice.
