Learning customer preferences informs everything about the way you build your business, from the theme for your website to the way you craft your emails. It’s therefore unfortunate that customer market research has a reputation for being difficult and tedious.
Getting to know your customers doesn’t have to be a challenge. It’s hard enough reeling them in to begin with, so why work harder than necessary in finding out what their lifetime value will be? Still saying that is one thing, but actually expending less effort to get the results you need is another thing entirely.
So to make it a bit easier on you, our loyal reader, we’ve curated a list of the 10 most practical and popular tools to help you learn more about your customers.
Jotform Survey Maker
Pinterest is a popular social media site in which users create visual representations of their interests and aspirations. It’s also a goldmine of data about consumer perception, preference, and other pin-able predilections. Setup your own profile to measure consumer interest in your products.
Survey Monkey
Here’s an original thought: you want customer opinions, why not ask them directly? The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line after all. Use Survey Monkey to design targeted surveys for your most active customers. You’ll be able to glean invaluable insights from their feedback.
FreeLunch.com
This is a data gathering website with a bit of a broader scope. You can locate and download economic, geographic, financial, industry, governmental, and demographical data according to a number of different filters. It’s an enormous dataset that can really round out the information you need to make smart marketing decisions.
American Fact Finder
A database in the same vein as FreeLunch, American Fact Finder is the U.S. government’s official store of records concerning population, labor costs, and other demographics. Use it to collect broader stroke insights about who and where to market to.
AYTM.com
AYTM stands for Ask Your Target Market, and it’s a handy little site that offers you the tools to conduct your own online studies, or alternatively to allow them to conduct the studies for you. This works by defining your target market and sending out a survey to panelists that match your description. It’s very similar to Survey Monkey in that regard.
Inbound.org
Sometimes the most valuable information is finding out what’s getting the most attention. Inbound.org is a fantastic resource for seeing what sort of content is garnering the most views around the web. It’s a bit more focused than some of the other data gathering resources on this list, but if you’re in an online marketing niche, this should be your first stop for measuring customer trends.
Fliptop.com
Fliptop is a service with a powerful function that allows you to look up personal information about members of your contact lists, simply by feeding it their email addresses. Not only does it provide personal data, but Fliptop also ranks your customer list, with a unique scoring criteria designed to separate high converting leads from the duds.
Xobni.com
Xobni organizes and compliments all of the user data in your Microsoft Outlook files. In addition to making your old conversations with customers (as well as any accompanying attachments in old emails) more searchable, Xobni pulls in social media information for those contacts along with any other related network data connected to their email addresses. Of course you might not use Outlook. If that’s the case then you need to take a look at number 9 on our list.
Rapportive.com
Rapportive works a lot like Xobni, except for your Gmail accounts. It’s a plugin for your browser, so long as you don’t use Internet Explorer. It’s compatible with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though, and it’s an extremely affable add on. Every time you open an email, a Rapportive sidebar will open up showing the sender’s associated network profiles, their pictures, and an assortment of other information stored online.
Rapleaf.com
Rapleaf is the more comprehensive version of Fliptop. Again, all it needs is an email address, and in return you get a disconcerting amount of personal information about your contact. Age, sex, location, consumer habits, personal interests, even socioeconomic status. It’s like the NSA made a site just for marketers. But don’t be alarmed, just get an account and use your powers for good.
Now that you’ve been thusly educated and empowered about the many customer marketing research tools at your disposal, it’s time to get out there and put them to good use. Focus your content according to your findings and watch the revenues roll in.
Bio
Zack Rutherford is a freelance copywriter. He contributes web content and especially snappy articles to TemplateMonster. Combat sports enthusiast and poetic soul, Zack endeavors to create beauty through syntax, sentence structure, and the liberal use of hyperbole. https://plus.google.com/u/1/+ZackRutherford
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