Collecting Customer Data

Collect the Minimum (customer’s or prospect’s name, gender, email adress)

In most cases, knowing a customer’s or prospect’s name, gender and email address might be all you really need.

Don’t ask for their home address, marital status, birthday and so on unless you’re asking them to sign up for your birthday club and want to give them a coupon for a free sample at a neighborhood restaurant.

If you simply must have more than the basics, incentivize it.

For example, give them access to your monthly email newsletter if they also give you a home address.

The more permissions an app asks for, the bigger and better the incentive needs to be.

Asking other information

Ask for Everything You Want (but Make it Optional).Let’s say you really want 12 bits of data from your customers, but would be satisfied with five. When you ask for their data, make the first 5 fields required and then the next 7 optional.

The last thing you want to do is lose the valuable information you could be getting from those first 5 fields. Who knows, they might give you 10 out of 12. That’s a lot better than nothing at all.

Other data points to collect for an overall demographic snapshot are age, profession and gender. 

There’s a lot of information you can use for your marketing efforts that’s already available on Facebook Insights. You can learn the gender, age and location (cities and countries) of your fans or Likes. And you don’t have to ask them explicitly for this information.

As you develop trust with your customers, go deeper and ask them for certain psychographic data points, like details about their personalities, values and lifestyles.

Make it Worthwhile

Enthusiastic fans of a brand or business will willingly give up all sorts of data if they believe that what they’re getting in return is appealing.

Maybe you offer a great prize, or offer a coupon for free shipping, or give access to a new ebook that you just wrote.

If your customers value what you have to give/sell, they’ll give you what you value in return. Don’t present them with a big form to fill out and offer nothing in return. Not many people have that much free time.

Do Your Customers a Favor

I hear all the time from businesses who use apps with a Facebook Permissions prompt that they do so to “save the customer time.” But in many cases, all you do when you use the Permissions prompt is make your potential users click away from your app.

You already know your users’ gender, age, location, Likes, interests, friends, etc. It’s up to you to decide how much value there is in collecting information beyond that.

Remember that if a user is not willing to fill out the most basic information—i.e., name and email address—he or she wouldn’t have come to your page in the first place.

Most requests start out with the marketer saying, “I just want to fill out their name and email address for them so they don’t have to type it.” Then the conversation turns into “Well, while I have their attention, I’d also like their friend list, so that I can invite them to the app.” Then inevitably, “Oh, if I could access everything they’ve Liked in the past six months, that would be great too.”

You see how slippery the slope gets? You don’t really want to save your customers time, you want to market to them and their friends. Savvy marketers may truly need this data for advanced apps, but they should also know how to use it correctly and not abuse it.

When you collect only the information the user gives voluntarily, this can lead to more users of your app.