What is customer profiling and do you really need it? Yes, you do. But only if you do it the right way. Because when you get it spot on, it's not as boring as it sounds. Plus, it's no longer an empty tick-boxing exercise you have to do every year. And yes, it will bring more money into your business. Ready to get all the juicy stuff about this? Let's go. SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:14) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.(4:06) Customer profiling demystified - what exactly is it?(5:19) Is there such a thing as too much segmentation?(9:15) How can small businesses effectively profile their customers?(11:15) Why do you want to collect customer data?(13:12) Start running (good) surveys.(17:18) The Phone Pshychic approach. (21:35) How to run calls with your subscribers.(26:45) Check out ResponseSuite.(28:22) Subject line of the week.[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]Customer profiling demystified - what exactly is it?What do we, as small business owners and email marketers, need to know about subscriber and customer profiling? Let's start with this. Customer profiling is all about taking the people on your list and working out who they are, what they want, where they are, and most importantly, whether they bought from you yet or not.So immediately, on your list, you can identify two types of people – those who’ve bought from you (i.e. your customers), and those who haven’t. And out of your customers, you have people who are super fans (and have bought everything you ever had for sale), those who only bought one thing a long time ago and then never again, and everyone else in between. Why is it helpful to have this information about the people on your list? Because it allows you to figure out what to do with them. Is there such a thing as too much segmentation? A mistake we definitely made when we got started was to apply tags within our email marketing platform that would give us loads of information about people, including what their interests were based on what links they clicked on in our emails. But did we really need all that information? Probably not. There are very few businesses that need to know that level of detail about someone. Most of us don’t need a huge granular level of tagging based on people’s interests.If you have products that align specifically with each of those interests, then great. But if you don’t, then too much tagging is definitely a thing. Ultimately, you want to boil the business down to what you sell and then understand what would be useful information to have so that you can sell to those people. In other words, all you have to do is find out enough about people in order to be able to sell your product. That way, you can identify those you should sell to versus the ones you should keep away from.So as a tiny business, you don’t need hundreds of segments. You wouldn’t send different emails every day to each of your segments anyway - most people struggle with just sending one! It’s great to have segmented data in your list, but if you have too many segments, you can't easily do anything with any of them. And that's a bit of a problem, don't you think?How can small businesses effectively profile their customers? Let’s look at some of the ways you can divide people up. First of all, segmenting people based on whether they've paid you money (i.e. they're customers) or they haven't yet is too generic - it doesn't provide enough information for you...