Demographics, Psychographics, Socialgraphics—Uniting Divided Customer Profiles

While psychographics provide a better view of a customer, a new level of data has been introduced, which incorporates social media data—sometimes referred to as socialgraphics—and helps give marketers an even more comprehensive view of the customer. This type of data captures attitudes, characteristics, behavior and motivations of customers online. Since the data from social networks consists of fields, which users grant permission for brands to use, customers have a higher expectation that communications will be tailored to them.

Social data truly brings customer data to the next level and, when paired with demographics and psychographics, marketers have a more complete view of a customer and can build lists that draw on all three to indentify targets who are highly likely to be interested in the offering in question.

The fact that customers can be different in so many ways and yet similar in one critical aspect makes list-building a very complicated process. But understanding how psychographics, social data and demographics play into customer data that is already collected will help tremendously. For instance, if you take a representative set of existing customers, overlay that with the external data attributes and then use profiling and predictive modeling to understand how the overlaid attributes are correlated to characteristics of your very best customers. The learnings can then be transferred across to non-customers or prospects, to make sure that the efforts are focused on those potential best customers—instead, for example, of acquiring a set of new customers that who easy to sign up but will not have a high lifetime value. By using intuitive solutions to access customer data, organizations can achieve increased productivity, faster decision-making and greater campaign profitability.

List-building and selecting the right customers to send communications to no longer has to be a guessing game. Marketers can determine what piece of communication should go to each customer and what each communication should say. By using psychographic information coupled with demographic and social data, companies can save time, resources and headaches and ultimately strengthen lifetime customer relationships.

Patrick Surry, Ph.D., is global solutions owner of customer analytics and interaction at Stamford, Conn.-based marketing software provider Pitney Bowes Software. He can be reached at patrick.surry@pb.com.

• MORE ON
• LISTS & INSERT MEDIA