Gathering Market Research
Your web site can serve as a rich source of information about your customers and prospective customers if you let it. The data it gathers will let you know who’s interested, who’s buying, where they’re from, and what they’re looking for. Careful gathering, analysis, and synthesis of this information is crucial. Luckily, there are tools available to help you with this.
 

• Gather information from your customers and site visitors to find their problems. People don’t buy products, they buy solutions for their problems. Find a solution to their problem and you have a sale. The more you can find out what they are, the more successful your company can be.

• Beware of inaccuracies survey data will contain. Customer trust must be earned and they must trust you before they will provide truthful responses on your surveys. Site visitors provide incorrect information up to 60% of the time, thinking they are providing fodder to spammers. You’ll need to set up confirmation and verification procedures.

• Only half the population uses the net. Find out which half your customers are in.

• Gather tracking, order and form information about your customers and site visitors and organize it. Use the data to build customer and visitor profiles (Individuals? Purchasing Directors? Sex? Race? Age? Employer? Geographical Location? Referring Site?

• Examine your web site’s log to determine most/least popular pages and downloads.

• Include a visitor soundoff/suggestion box on your site and read what they say. Acknowledge and thank them for their input.

• Include a bulletin board or message board on your site to obtain visitor opinions and feedback.

• Offer discounts or freebies to customers who fill out an opinion survey form. Omit name to minimize concerns about privacy. Anonymity makes customers more willing to provide information.

• Zoomerang.com - Service from Market Tools to create all kinds of surveys online. For $199 per year, you can get reports, customized surveys with your logo on them.

• Net Value has surveyed 5200 demographically representative Internet users whose responses have been organized and web habits tracked. Like a Web Neilsen, they sell info ($3500 per month) on specific demographics to help you better target your ads and marketing efforts.

• Hold drawings and giveaways where you collect business cards of local merchants and professionals either offline or online to increase your prospect list..

Keeping Customer Records
Once you gather information about customers and site visitors, you need to store it in such a way that it can be accessed and analyzed easily. This is best done using a database program: either a contact manager or accounting system and data mining software. The ability to move data between these programs is also helpful.

• Contact Manager programs allow you to keep track of each contact you have with a customer, prospect, company or site visitor. Besides being able to call up a history of the contacts you have had with a customer and mentioning past specifics while talking to him on the phone, you can also apply data mining software to that same data to gain insights into customer and prospect concerns and interests and detect patterns that can allow you to improve customer satisfaction and better target your mnarketing to the right people and hot buttons.

• Accounting Program - Order data from your web site can be directly entered into your company’s accounting program for processing and fulfillment. Small businesses using Intuit’s Quickbooks accounting program will especially appreciate this cost effective way of keeping track of web orders.

• Opt-In - A critical field to be included in all forms you ask customers send to you is the Opt-In field, which customers and prospects can check, giving you permission to send them marketing and informational material from time to time. Obtaining each person’s permission to opt-in is imperative and clearly differentiates you from spammers. Regularly send newsy emails, discount coupons, newsletters, press releases, free samples, and catalog updates to members of this opt-in database.