Postcode profiling
A postcode can tell you a lot about your customers but too many retailers ignore this valuable source of demographic information
Most online businesses are content to grab email details for customers and use this as the basis of their subsequent email marketing, while a few others take it one step further and use the email address along with purchase information to slice-and-dice their lists. However there’s a host of information available from the users postcode that many retailers just throw away.
There are a host of statistical packages available to companies trading online which provide information on website visitor activity. These can show invaluable data such as number of visits, referring sites, keyword searches used, and hits by week, day and hour. However, without the use of lengthy surveys at point of purchase, which may put some buyers off, there is no way of finding out useful customer information.
Customer profiling and location planning consultancy Cartogen
(www.cartogen.co.uk) have come up with a solution to this problem. The Brighton based consultancy is making detailed consumer profiling available to Ecommerce businesses throughout the UK. Cartogen’s advanced systems can provide demographic, lifestyle and behavioural information based solely on postcode.
Cartogen uses Eurodirect’s CAMEO profiling system which assigns every UK postcode to one of ten groups and, within those, 57 categories. Available information includes brand preferences, leisure activities, newspaper readership and holiday destinations along with a wealth of other geodemographic and financial data. Standard information such as age, sex, housing type and income are also available. All that is required is the customer postcode, which is supplied with every transaction.
Cartogen’s service has helped a number of offline businesses in their customer profiling and marketing processes, clients including Shell Gas and Yates’s Wine Lodge, and now the company plans to change the way online retailers use their customer data.
For an annual fee companies can have their customer database profiled on a monthly basis. The service is described as “very affordable”
We would be interested in hearing from anyone who uses postcode information for a forthcoming feature we’re doing on demographic profiling. Email us at marcus@internetretailing.net
