Customer profiling is a widely used technique in digital marketing, by which it’s possible to obtain particularly accurate analysis of potential customers, to make targeted commercial decisions based on data and therefore with greater probability of obtaining positive feedback.
In particular, customer profiling is one of the Big Data Analytics applications, enabling the creation of personalized digital marketing campaigns.
Problems solved thanks to customer profiling
Customer profiling allows optimal management of the Customer Base, which is critical both for companies, which aim at the sale of products and services, and in public organizations that intend to start fundraising activities.
In particular, the result of applying Big Data Analytics techniques for customer profiling allows you to:
- integrate and normalize data management
- resolve inconsistencies in the data collected
- make contact information available to prospects
- know in detail the preferences of prospects
How to profile a customer
Customer profiling is based on the use of statistical algorithms which, taking into account the behavioral data of the entire customer base, are able to attribute one or more “behavioral classes” to a specific customer or prospect.
The techniques used in this context can be supervised – so called classification techniques, and the algorithms are used to identify end user defined classes, or unsupervised – so called clustering techniques, used to partition the customer base into subsets within which customers are similar in behavior.
In both cases, the attribution of a class to a customer makes it possible to implement appropriate marketing processes, which can aim to strengthen specific purchasing behaviors or, vice versa, to induce a specific customer to adopt different behaviors in order to “Change class”.
The advantages of customer profiling
Thanks to artificial intelligence techniques, organizations can acquire important competitive advantages, with significant savings in advertising costs, since campaigns can be “targeted” to specific classes of customers, reducing the number of targets and maximizing the return on investment.
In summary, the main advantages of user profiling are the following:
- marketing strategy optimization
- creation of a targeted communication towards customers
- reduction of advertising costs
- increased return on investment
