The Data Driven Section

CareAbout websites have the added benefit of being “Data Driven”.

This means that you can use your website to capture data about what your customers want from a relationship with your business.

This is important because regardless of the quality of your products and services, Customer Loyalty is about holding a dialogue with your customers.

In order for this to be a positive experience for your customers, it is vital that the dialogue is relevant to their needs.

This is where Market Segmentation comes in. We have talked about Products and their Benefits to their Target Markets. In effect we have already taken our first view of our market segmentation. "These People Buy these Products"

By obtaining customer feedback, from your website on a page by page or product by product basis, we can firm up on which benefits are most important to which customers, and begin to to understand "WHY" "These People Buy these Products".

The Tools for obtaining this feedback are listed below:-

Forums

Where customers can express their views and participate in debate anonymously, should they wish, or by logging on and having their opinions known.

Surveys

Embedded Surveys

These are surveys embedded in the HTML content. As such they need to be short and relevant to the content.

Full Surveys

These can be more detailed, but we would encourage you to keep them concise.

Forms

From registering to ordering a product a form is required to collect the relevant data.

Vision

All the above survey products are supplied via our “Vision” product. Vision provides the interface between the website and the underlying marketing database.

Your Data Strategy is key here. This is because you need to think through how you want to categorise customer responses in order to obtain meaningful data.

You will need to consider, that as your relationship with your customers eVolves over time, your data requirements will change.

Let us start at the beginning.

Your data strategy is determined by your segmentation model. Initially this can be as simple as your product range.(Which Customers buy which products)

As your customer understanding evolves, you will identify different target markets for each product.

You will then start to look at cross selling opportunities where a certain group of customers frequently buy more than one of your products.

As you begin to understand why this is, your will begin to understand your customers in terms of their needs.

This will change your communications strategy and segmentation models into a needs based approach.

Ultimately this will allow you to hold a Vision of what your customers will want next year, which moves us into the realms of internal and external change management.

But for now we need to learn how to use these tools.

Next Step

Go to the UserGuide www.careabout.co.uk/community/userguide

and practice "Embedding Surveys", "Creating Forms" and "Full Surveys"

These areas are covered in Unit 3/. of the CareAbout WebMaster Training Sessions.

See "Joining the CareAbout Community" Tab.

(Setting up Forums are dealt with seperately in "Forums" section).

 

Next Step GOTO the "Form Filling" Tab