If someone asked you if you know your customer, what would you say? Whether you are the product/service owner or the print provider (internal or external), doesn’t really matter. What matters is what you really know about the person you are trying to serve with your products and services.

Many companies believe they know their customer because they have a database full of information. Names, addresses, phone numbers and information about those products and services they sell to their customers. It’s good information, but provides a fairly limited view of your customer, focusing on the relationship you have with your customer, not the big picture. Still, it is a good place to start.

That leads us to the obvious question: are you using what you know about your customer to talk to them more effectively and let them know how to be a more educated consumer of your products and services? Knowing your customer means being able to put your customer into a demographic segment based on where they live, and also on how they do business with you.

Think about where they live. Do you have more customers in urban settings or rural settings? You can tell by their zip code or post code. Mapping their address to information you can acquire from the census bureau, you can build a basic profile of your current customers, and determine where you might find new customers more easily.

Think about what they buy from you. Are most of your customers buying large ticket items on a monthly or quarterly basis, or do they buy frequently throughout the month but at a lower transaction amount? Can you segment your customers into revenue towers that give you an idea of which customers produce the most revenue?

Can you go a step farther and lay these two pieces of data over top of one another? You may find that your urban customers have different types of transactions than your suburban or rural customers. You may find that both your least productive and most productive customers have common characteristics, such as the time of the month they buy or how close to the due date they pay their bills.

This is all part of demographic profiling. It’s something your marketing department, or your customer’s marketing department, is likely doing today with respect to their media and print buys as well as their development of direct mail campaigns. It is data that is rarely shared with the folks responsible for generating the transaction documents.

Step one on the road to communicating more effectively with your customers is to find out what the organization really knows about the customer who receives the bill or statement. Once you have an idea of who your current customers are, we can start to figure out how to speak to them more effectively and how to find more customers who look like those who produce the best revenue for you.

Come back next time when we take the next step. And, don’t forget. This is a dialogue! Send your questions, ideas, concerns and challenges, and let’s make it a conversation.