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Customer profiling consolidates data on customer behaviors, demographics, and motivations in one location. You can use what you learn to tailor your marketing and product offerings to the people most likely to buy from you.
Customer profiles can benefit your brand in other ways, too. For example, olive oil brand Citizens of Soil used customer profiles to land a distribution deal with the online grocery retailer Ocado.
“I knew who their audience was and what their customer profiles were,” says Sarah Vachon, founder of Citizens of Soil, on Shopify Masters. “I literally knew, ‘Your customer is our customer. We’ve already surveyed our customers, and they tell us that they shop from you. It’s exactly the profile.’”
Ahead, learn how customer profiling can benefit your business and how to create your own customer profiles.
What is customer profiling?
Customer profiling is the practice of aggregating information such as demographic data, customer preferences, purchase history, and pain points into summaries of your customers. This process can help you understand your target audience and tailor your marketing efforts through strategies such as customer segmentation.
In a business-to-business (B2B) context, customer profiling often means collecting data on individual customer accounts using a customer relationship management (CRM) system or customer data platform (CDP).
Customer profiles vs. buyer personas
Buyer personas are fictional characters that embody the characteristics that define your ideal customers. Businesses use them to guide marketing campaigns aimed at reaching a certain type of consumer.
Customer profiles, on the other hand, are in-depth analyses of your actual customers. Businesses use them to reach both existing customers and new consumers who are likely to become buyers.
Benefits of customer profiling
Here are a few ways customer profiles can help you grow your business:
Improved marketing efforts
You can use what you learn through customer profiling to craft a data-driven marketing strategy.
For example, you can tailor your marketing strategy to customers’ purchasing behavior, which you’ll include in your customer profiles. Using the AI tool Shopify Sidekick, fashion house Maggy London discovered that their customers weren’t brand-loyal. Instead, they shopped across the store’s various brands interchangeably.
Maggy London used this data to inform their marketing and cross-brand merchandising strategies, meaning displaying products from different brands together.
Lowered customer acquisition costs
Customer profiling helps you identify who is most likely to buy from you. You can then show paid ads only to customers who match this profile, which can help you lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC).
One way to do this is with lookalike audiences. These are groups of consumers who share characteristics with your ideal customers. You can create lookalike audiences with Shopify Audiences, which uses Shopify’s ecommerce data.
“Being able to find those prospective and lookalike customers when you’re a hyper-growth company is critical,” says Cory Gionet, VP of ecommerce at fragrance brand Pura. Pura used Shopify Audiences to target users across Meta, Google, and TikTok and saw up to 30% improvements on CAC and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Tailored customer service
The customer insights you gain through profiling—such as languages spoken, location, and order history—can inform how you interact with individual customers.
Seeing individual customers’ histories with your brand can be especially important in a B2B context, since so much of your business can come from a single account or decision-maker. You can pull up individual customer data with Shopify’s customer profile feature.
Shopify automatically generates a customer profile after a shopper signs up for your mailing list or creates a customer account, places an order, or starts an order but abandons checkout.
When a customer contacts your store, you can pull up their customer profile to view information such as order history, enabling you to create an individualized customer service experience and encourage brand loyalty. You can also add tags like “VIP” to profiles.
You can then sync these profiles with your Shopify POS system to provide the same level of service in-store and online.
4 customer profiling methods
Here are a few types of consumer data to include in customer profiles:
Demographic
Demographic data include information such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, and education level.
Bridesmaid dress and suit company Birdy Grey uses two key pieces of demographic data for customer profiling: age and marital status. The company primarily sells to 28-year-old brides. This narrow customer profile helps Birdy Grey focus their marketing strategy.
Psychographic
Psychographic data includes information about an individual’s personality: their likes and dislikes, opinions and values, general lifestyle, and political or religious affiliations. While these data points can vary across customer types, you might focus on a commonality.
The energy drink brand Guru, for example, focuses on its audience’s preference for organic ingredients.
“We have multiple personas that all tie to one real strong need, which is positioning ourselves apart from our synthetic competitors as [the] original better-for-you energy drink,” says Shingly Lee, vice president of marketing, on Shopify Masters.
Geographic
Geographic data tells you where your customers are located. Geographic data can help you craft relevant marketing content and may influence your product releases.
Geographic data is also important for deciding where to display physical marketing materials, such as billboards, and where to open physical stores or stock products.
“As we were opening these brick-and-mortar stores, we utilized Shopify data to understand where our customers actually lived,” says Kristen Pumphrey, founder of P.F. Candle Co., on Shopify Masters. “We noticed that we had a big customer base in Brooklyn, and I used to live there, so I said, ‘Let’s open a store in Brooklyn.’”
Behavioral
Behavioral data encompasses how individuals use your product, spend their money, and interact with your brand. It includes interactions in-store, on your ecommerce site, and through social media, customer service, or other communication channels.
One type of behavioral profiling, called typological profiling, examines consumers’ motivations for engaging with your brand. Here are a few different types of typological profiles:
- Discount consumers. Individuals motivated by savings rather than brand loyalty.
- Loyal consumers. People with a personal connection to a brand.
- Impulsive consumers. Buyers who frequently make emotional purchases.
- Need-based consumers. Infrequent shoppers who buy based on needs rather than desires.
Umbrella company Original Duckhead used behavioral data from Shopify Analytics to better understand customer needs.
“We learned that she likes to shop all year-round, which is great,” says Original Duckhead founder Morgan Cros. “We even find that in sunny countries they still like a good umbrella, and that she will buy more than one. And a lot of times, if she likes a product, she will then buy one to gift.”
How to create a customer profile
- Collect customer data
- Create a customer journey map
- Collect customer feedback
- Build your customer profiles
Here’s how to create your own customer profiles:
1. Collect customer data
Collect demographic and behavioral information about your customers. You can collect demographic information about your customers through analytics platforms. For example, Shopify Analytics shows you information such as where your customers are located and which marketing channels drive traffic to your website.
You can also use Shopify Customer reports to better understand your customers. This tool shows you shopping data, such as average order count and value.
2. Create a customer journey map
Customer journey maps track shoppers’ path to purchase. They also look at post-purchase interactions like leaving reviews and engaging with customer service.
You can create a customer journey map using quantitative data, including email opens and ad attribution stats, and qualitative data, such as interviews and surveys. Use a customer journey map template to get started.
3. Collect customer feedback
Use surveys, interviews, focus groups, and reviews to better understand your customer base.
Birdy Grey uses customer feedback to keep up with trends among its customer base of 28-year-old brides. This strategy has helped them transition from a company geared toward millennials to one suited to Gen Z.
“We are very, very receptive to customer feedback,” says Grace Lee Chen, founder of Birdy Grey. “We’ve built a whole customer feedback loop through tracking NPS [Net Promoter Score] feedback, CSAT [customer satisfaction score] feedback, things that are written on third-party wedding sites, and things that are written in our own product reviews.”
You can create short surveys for customers using a tool like Shopify Forms, display your questions in website pop-ups or emails, and then review responses in your Shopify admin. Apps like Asklayer also help you create onsite, post-purchase, and email surveys.
4. Build your customer profiles
Build out your customer profiles with demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic information (or combinations of certain types of information). Once you’ve created your customer profiles, revisit them to ensure they’re up to date with order history and spend data. Shopify’s customer profile feature automatically updates this information for you.
Customer profiling FAQ
What is the difference between B2B and B2C customer profiles?
Business-to-business (B2B) customer profiles typically focus on individual customer accounts. Business-to-consumer (B2C) customer profiles focus on categorizing customer groups based on characteristics such as purchase motivations, demographic data, and purchase history.
What are the four types of customer profiling?
The four types of customer profiling data are demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral.
Why is customer profiling important?
Customer profiling helps you understand your consumers and their purchasing motivations. It allows you to tailor your marketing efforts, lower customer acquisition costs, deliver better customer service, and improve customer loyalty.
