Businesses thrive on user data—we made that crystal clear in our last edition. The only way you can develop a DTC business online is by creating it for your customers, that is, keeping their needs and requirements front and center when designing products, services, business operations, and marketing strategies. But how do you know what kind of data is right for your business?
The consumer data most businesses collect can be categorized into four segments:
1. Personal Data
Personally identifiable information like your social security number, gender, name, age, and location, as well as non-personally identifiable information, such as IP address, cookies, and device IDs, are all accounted for in this category of data.
2. Engagement Data
All data accumulated through the interactions between you and the consumers are accounted for in this category. That includes interaction with the brand’s website, apps, chatbots, social media pages, and more.
3. Behavioral Data
This category includes transactional details such as purchase histories, search history, and qualitative data (e.g., website hotspots).
4. Attitudinal Data
This data type includes essential KPIs, such as consumer satisfaction, product desirability, etc.
While understanding what kind of data is most important for your DTC business is essential, having an action plan to collect, synthesize, and put into use is even more crucial.
An accurate and effective plan to go about it is:
🎯 Determine the kind of data your business needs.
📅 Select a timeframe to collect the data.
📝 Curate a plan for collecting the data—from the platform, method, and additional details.
🕸️ Collect the data.
🔍 Synthesize the data you’ve collected.
🔁 Recalibrate your business plans based on the analysis.
Of course, capturing large quantities of data can give your business a hard time. Not only is it difficult as a new/small business, but it’s also extremely difficult to sort through. Make sure to work on creating an efficient strategy for acquiring only the necessary information from your customers and make use of an automation tool integrated within your system.
These automation tools not only help you collect data without the need for any manual labor but also flag anomalies, synthesize the information, and put it into effective use in your strategy.
