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Small business owners are always looking to find new, strategic ways to market their online businesses. When it comes to extending your reach and increasing brand loyalty, email marketing continues to be a helpful tool as you build and maintain relationships with your target audience. However, sending the same content to everyone may not be the best way to engage with every subscriber or customer.
Whether you sell products or content, send newsletters, or accept donations, it’s useful to create customer profiles, like Squarespace Profiles, based on the types of customers you get and potential customers you hope to attract. These profiles can help you offer a great customer experience and strengthen your marketing strategy by engaging your email subscribers with the most relevant content.
What is a customer profile?
A customer profile, sometimes called a consumer profile or buyer persona, is a detailed view of your current customer base or your ideal customer. A typical customer profile includes basic demographics like age, location, and income, alongside details like purchasing habits.
Other customer profile tools, like Squarespace Profiles, share customer metrics, like how much someone spends in your online store, whether they’re a new customer or donor, and whether they’ve opted in to receive marketing communications from you.
You may also be able to get in-depth details about their buying patterns, like how much repeat customers spend in your store on average or the starting point from which they found your site to make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter.
What are the benefits of customer profiles?
Getting to know your customers, subscribers, or donors is a great way to help you understand what’s working—or what’s not working—with your online business. By categorizing and watching for patterns among different customer demographics, you can better anticipate a customer’s needs or pain points they experience when using your website.
By maintaining detailed individual customer profiles on Squarespace, you can easily add tags or notes to personalize and manage items like product subscriptions. This way, you can tailor your marketing messaging to different customer groups and ensure your visitors and subscribers are getting relevant content based on how they interact with your brand.
How do you create a customer profile?
Create a customer profile by pulling together data points from your current customers or followers. You may not have access to their demographic information, but you can identify target customers or customer groups based on their past purchases or interactions with your marketing campaigns.
For example, you might create a profile for your best customers—people who visit your site regularly, subscribe to and interact with your newsletter, or are repeat buyers from your business.
You can also create an ideal customer profile based on the type of customer you want to attract to grow your brand. Consider who the target market is for your brand in this situation—what’s their age group, their interests and income level?
For both types of customer profile, you can look at a customer profile template or customer profile examples for businesses similar to yours to understand the type of customer information that would be helpful for you to have.
Using customer profiles to market your brand
On Squarespace websites, Profiles provides a holistic and actionable view of everyone who engages with your website, all in one place. You can view your customers, email subscribers, donors, and members in a single panel. From there, you can create and curate custom customer segments based on specific audience attributes such as total spend, minimum order, subscription date, and other tags you can customize for your business needs.
For example, you can filter your customer profiles to see all email subscribers who have spent over $100, have made a minimum of five purchases, have been subscribers since 2019, or are tagged as VIP. Then, you can customize the email campaigns they receive from your brand or use these insights into your customers’ spending habits to help plan your next promotion or new products.
By curating customer segments, you’ll be able to learn specific insights about your subscribers that will then, in turn, help you to continue growing your mailing lists and your business. And as you continue to add to your audience, you’ll be able to target customers with content that speaks to their specific segment, which can help with customer retention as well. For example, if you’re looking to grow your newsletter audience, you can create a custom email that encourages your most loyal subscribers to share your content with a friend or family member.
Read more email marketing tips for small businesses
This post was updated on January 23, 2023.