Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with brief but valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter, so we get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information that will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 42. This episode is about data. What data you should be collecting from your customers, what to do with it, and the best ways to collect it. Let's jump in. First of all, why we've been having this episode. The reason we're having this episode is because sometimes data is overlooked by small businesses.

A lot of small businesses think that they don't need to collect their customer's data, and it's just something they can overlook, and I think that's just silly and wrong and might be the easy way out, but it'll definitely cost you in the long run. So why do we wanna collect data? Uh, the answer is simple. So we can use the data to get the customers to shop with us. Again, a lot of business owners are uncomfortable with collecting data, and I think that's totally, that's totally reasonable, but I think it's important to get comfortable with collecting data and just be respectful of your customers. Be respectful of how you ask for the data and be respectful of what you do with the data. You should never be buying or selling data. This data is for you to use and only for you to use the customer.

Shared it with you, not somebody else. And you know, the same goes with data that you may buy. If you buy an email list, um, the customers did not share their email address with you, so they don't want to hear from you. So just, you know, keep it clean, keep it simple. So first, what kind of data should we collect? Um, I think at a very basic level, we should be collecting customer name, customer email, customer phone number, their birthday, and their address. I think like that's the holy grail of customer information. Um, you can collect more than that, but I think like that's a very good baseline of where you should start.

Now you may ask like, how am I supposed to collect that? This is not, um, you know, they're not signing up for a passport, right? They're just buying address, or they're buying a gift for someone. They're not gonna gimme all that information. And you know, you're right. You don't have to collect all that information at once. You can collect that information over the 10 times that they shop. Maybe the first time they shop, you just get their name and email. Second time you get their phone number, their time, their birthday, next time, their address. Um, just, you know, take it slow. I think there's no like rush to get the data. But your goal every time, your cus the customer checks out the register should be to attach a specific customer to the purchase. And even if the customer is not buying something, you should try to get some piece of information from that customer. So I think it's very important to make collecting the data fun, uh, for the customer. You don't wanna off the customer. So how can we do that? I think the easiest way to do that is

To just, to just have a loyalty program, um, or a birthday club or something like that. So for example, if you're at the register and you ask the customer just straight up, Hey, can we get your name and email so we can send you emails? Um, they might not be so excited to give it to you, but if you ask them for their information so they can join the loyalty program, your loyalty program well done, where they will earn rewards, um, and get discounts and exclusives and stuff like that, they might be more excited. Also, if you ask a customer for their birthday, who wants to share their birthday. However, if they find out that they're gonna get a free gift on their birthday, they may be, they may give their birthday. I'm never gonna forget the time that I went through an ice cream store and they had a paper with a pen right at the register that said, sign up.

You know, for sign up for a free ice cream on your birthday, all you have to give was your name, email, phone, number, birthday. And I signed up. And now I go to that ice cream store more than any other ice cream store because a, they gimme free ice cream on my birthday, which I love. But b, they have my information and they use it sparingly, but they'll text me once in a while, they'll email me once in a while, make it fun for your customer and just don't make it difficult and uncomfortable. I think that's the key. Um, the next thing we'll talk about is what should you be doing with this data? And I think, you know, it's very simple. It just depends on the data that you have. So if you have their name, number one, that's great. You use it to, you use it in your communication channels to speak to them by name.

If you are going, if you have a customer's phone number and you text the customer, you can use their first name. So, hey Elliot, check out these exclusive deals we have for you. Instead of, hey, random. Now you created a little bit of more of a personal connection. And customers appreciate personal connection. If you have their birthday and their phone number, you should text the customer on their birthday or a little bit before their birthday with a discount. If you have their email address, you can send them, you know, email campaigns about big sales that you're having. If you have their address, you could send 'em a postcard, you could send them a gift in the mail. Um, but just depending on the type of data that you have on your customers, so many different ways that you can reach out to your customers and entice them to shop again, I think one thing that's extremely important is you don't wanna overdo it.

You don't wanna send them emails every day. You don't wanna text 'em every day. Um, you just wanna be respectful of them. You wanna remind 'em that you're around when you have something important to say, you wanna text them. When you have, um, you know, something going on, you could send 'em an email. But just keep it simple, keep it light, keep it nice, and you can't really go wrong. You can't underestimate the importance of having customer data and using that data to get your customers to shop with you again. Anyways, thanks for listening. We're looking forward to the next episode. See you later.