CONSUMER DATA: Definition, Types, and How They Are Using It

As part of a larger customer relationship management strategy, businesses gather and analyze customer data to draw in, engage, and keep their most lucrative customers. Companies use this data to target customers with pertinent offers, promotions, and other goods and services as well as to give them a specialized experience based on their personal preferences. There are numerous methods for gathering customer information, but a Consumer Data Platform (CDP) is one of the best. Good consumer privacy policies and practices restrict or keep an eye on how companies and outside data collection agencies gather and use the data of your users.

Consumer Data

Customers’ online activity leaves a digital footprint known as consumer data. This data, which occasionally includes personal information, originates from a variety of sources and platforms, including social media platforms, marketing initiatives, customer service inquiries, call center communications, online browsing information, mobile applications, buying habits, and more.

It is described as the data that people give you when they interact with your brand. In addition to personal information, this data also includes the subjects’ interests, actions, and demography. They disseminate this information via a variety of platforms, including your website, mobile applications, feedback forms, surveys, social media, etc. They can implement growth strategies and offer a better customer experience as a result. This data can assist you in developing a more thorough understanding of your target market, gauging customer satisfaction, and making wise marketing and product development decisions.

Types of Customer Data

You can gather a ton of information from your interactions with customers. They differ based on various customer journey stages.

#1. Personal Data

This data enables you to recognize a customer as a person. The physical self and the digital self are the two different ways that people are identified. These include:

Person’s name
Date of birth
Contact details – Email address, Phone number, House address
Gender
Age
Job details – Job title, Company’s name
Login details
Driver’s license number
Social security number
Passport number
Bank account details

#2. Interaction Data

This information, which comes from customers interacting with your brand, is also referred to as “engagement data” on occasion. For businesses to analyze user behavior and gain insightful knowledge from it, this information is very helpful. Later, businesses use them to change how they engage with customers to achieve better results. Companies can learn the customers’ positions in the buying process by analyzing this data. They adjust (as necessary) their customer interactions in light of that information to aid the customer in continuing their journey.

Several instances of this kind of customer information include:

User queries
Customers download from the website
Demo request
Social shares
Pageviews
Backlink clicks

#3. Behavioral Data

When a customer interacts with your main product or service, they divulge information like this. This demonstrates how customers are using your product. When it comes to understanding how well your product performs, behavioral data is among the most useful data.

You can extract the following types of data from this type:

Which features customers are using
How they are using
Their login patterns
What are the most active hours on your app?
Deactivations
Customer churn
Upgrades
Heatmaps

#4. Attitudinal Data

You can better understand the feelings and general attitudes of your customers toward your brand by using attitude data. Since it is frequently challenging to quantify this information, it is also known as qualitative data. However, there aren’t many ways to quantify this information. The majority of this data is arbitrary, but it can help you better understand how customers perceive your company. The sources below provide this information:

Customer satisfaction
Net promoter score
Customer feedback
Success stories
Customer grievances
Purchase criteria
Challenges and motivation

Customer Data Management

Customer data management comprises three steps:

#1. Data Collection

To gather customer data, businesses employ a variety of methods. Customers engage with a brand at various points, and depending on the situation, they reveal various pieces of information. A few ways to collect data are

Social media: You can gather various engagement data from your customers’ interactions with your page on social media, such as likes, shares, and comments.
Website analytics: Data can be gathered using programs like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc. This information is mainly about website interaction.
Customer feedback: Customers are asked to provide their opinions on surveys as part of a regular exercise that businesses conduct with them.
Customer support: The software you use to track down the customer’s more technical information may also be a useful tool. These comprise issues with your product, their support issues, etc.
Tracking pixels: Tracking pixels can monitor IP addresses, operating systems, browsers, and other information that enables advertisers to run sophisticated remarketing campaigns. Marketers can find out about their customers’ conversion-related behaviors by using tracking pixels.

#2. Data Validation

Data management includes validation as a key component. Spending time collecting data only to discover later that it is insufficient is a complete waste of time. To maintain your data for future use, you must have a proper validation process in place.

#3. Data Analysis

Only if you analyze customer data with them, in the end, are collection and validation useful. You must be able to derive important insights from this analysis that will help you better plan your company’s course of action. To achieve better results, a method like data mining is very helpful.

Consumer Data Platform

Websites, mobile apps, and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are just a few of the places CDPs gather information. Application programming interfaces (APIs), event trackers (including JavaScript tags and SDKs), server-to-server integrations, and manual imports are some of the techniques used to gather data.

Once the information from any of these sources has been gathered, a CDP can assist you in combining all of your inconsistent data and enhancing its quality through a process of matching, standardization, and validation. It’s a good idea to use a CDP to gather data from as many sources as you can, but one of a consumer data platform’s most important features is a reliable method for resolving identity into a single customer view.

A Consumer Data Platform (CDP) is a piece of software used by other programs, systems, and marketing initiatives that collects and arranges customer data from various touchpoints. Real-time data is gathered by CDPs, who then organize it into distinct, centralized customer profiles. These data sets are ingested and integrated by a consumer data platform to produce a single, comprehensive consumer profile. The identity resolution or data unification process is what this integration is known as.

Benefits of a CDP

CDPs enhance your business, enhance your interactions with customers, and support your current software and marketing initiatives.

#1. CDPs Directly Gather Data from Your Audience

The primary goal of CDPs is to gather first-party data using pixels and other tracking devices. In this manner, you can constantly be sure that your CDP reflects the most accurate audience data.

#2. CDPs Aid in Customer Understanding

Fortunately, CDPs create customer profiles in a way that aids in familiarizing your company with every single person. The program can assist in building identity graphs and informing customer behavioral analyses. Using CDPs will help you market precisely and successfully while managing your customer relationships.

#3. Cross-Channel Marketing Efforts Are Unified by CDPs

By providing consolidated, precise data, CDPs streamline cross- and multi-channel marketing initiatives. Additionally, they help gather and arrange fresh data that could motivate additional, ongoing marketing initiatives.

#4. More Efficient Management of Customer Data

Customer data management refers to the procedure of gathering, organizing, and utilizing customer data. By arranging your customer data in a way that makes it useful, CDPs make this process incredibly straightforward.

#5. More Perceptive Consumer Analytics

Understanding customer behavior throughout the customer journey is necessary for making business decisions about marketing, product development, sales, and other areas.

#6. Improved Data Protection and Privacy

Respecting the privacy of your customer’s personal information is now more crucial than ever thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other data privacy laws.

What Is Consumer Data Used For?

Companies use this data to target customers with pertinent offers, promotions, and other goods and services as well as to give them a specialized experience based on their personal preferences. helps you comprehend your audience more fully, which enhances how you interact and communicate with both potential and current customers.

What Are the Sources of Consumer Data?

Surveys
Website analytics
Market research
Social media
Customer interactions

What Does “Customer Data” Mean?

Customer data includes personal, demographic, and behavioral information that can be used to better understand your audience and enhance your interactions with both current and potential clients. Customer data is the information you gather from customers as they engage with your brand through a variety of channels.

What Are the 5 Main Sources of Consumer Information?

Social media
Word of mouth
Surveys
Web analytics
Electronic media
Consumer reports

What Are 3 Examples of Customer Information?

Basic customer information includes things like contact information like name, email, phone, job title, and affiliated organizations. Basic customer information also includes demographics like gender and income as well as firmographics like annual revenue or sector.

Conclusion

Data should be the foundation of decisions for organizations of all sizes. Customer data platforms have emerged as a sophisticated method for bringing together and reconciling all of a business’s customer data, which is then used to create a full 360-degree customer profile. As a result, the value of the data significantly rises.

A Consumer Data Platform provides the immediateness, accuracy, and cohesion that we need to keep coordinating our departments, igniting our marketing, and enticing our customers.