Revolution in ecommerce customer data has come

Edited by the Marketingservicestalk editorial team Dec 5, 2007

Brighton based consultancy Cartogen Marketing is making detailed consumer profiling available to e-commerce businesses throughout the UK.

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 expert Cartogen has come up with a solution to this problem.

The Brighton-based consultancy is making detailed consumer profiling available to e-commerce 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 expertise 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.

Online businesses are in a unique position because they obtain customer address details with every transaction, building extensive databases simply by trading.

The sad truth is that they are not making the most of the information they have.

Cartogen is hoping to change that with the introduction of its new customer profiling service.

For an annual fee companies can have their customer database profiled on a monthly basis.

The service is very affordable and regular profile updates mean companies will stay up to date with shifts and trends within their customer base, and be in a position to react accordingly, putting them a step ahead of their competitors.

Cartogen is headed by Stephen Kennedy whose background is with a number of large retailers including Superdrug and Shell UK.

Cartogen's customer profiling service draws on this experience, using exactly the same tools as major corporations use to keep up with customer trends.

Now for the first time online traders of any size will have as much information on their customers as they do for website activity.

Painting a clear picture of who is actually purchasing from them will allow businesses to adapt their product offerings and strategies to suit their actual customers, and more effectively target their marketing activities.

In order for businesses to maintain growth it is vital that they know who their customers are.

This is the knowledge that Cartogen will bring to online businesses.