Customer Data: Best Customer Datasets & Databases

What is Customer Data?

Customer data refers to all information used by businesses to construct a profile of their prospective customer. It tells you about a customer’s demography, contact details, behavior, interests, financial habits, and more. Although it’s usually used to refer to individual customers, customer data actually covers both B2C and B2B activity.

What are the use cases of Customer Data?

Audience segmentation
The most effective customer outreach is achieved through segmenting your audience. A customer data provider can build pre-made audience segments using lookalikes according to your business’ target market and ideal customer profile.

Churn prevention
Having a deeper understanding of your customer always makes churn less likely. Customer data enrichment enables businesses to develop long-term, customer-orientated strategies which really nurture customer loyalty and reduce churn later in the customer journey.

What are the attributes of Customer Data?

Demographic
A solid customer database begins with a customer’s demographic data points. Basically, this means their name, age, and employment. The attributes of a customer dataset will almost always include this information.

Psychographic
Psychographic data relates to what interests and hobbies the customer has. These attributes could be things like ‘sports-lover’, ‘regular traveler’ which helps businesses understand what the customer likes and dislikes.

Contact information
For most marketing and sales purposes, the most important data point about a customer is their contact information. This is how they can turn insight into action by reaching out to a prospect. Of course, there are many channels through which a customer can be contacted. The most common are:

• Home address - knowing where a customer lives allows marketers to send postal campaigns. More generally, it allows businesses to locate the customer in a specific area. This comes into play when launching DOOH campaigns such as billboards. It only makes sense to display these physical ads in places near the customer’s home address, where they’re likely to see them!

• Mobile number - for sales teams, a customer’s phone number is the most important asset for communication. They can reach consumers directly via call or text, making phone one of the most efficient channels for customer outreach.

• Email address - email isn’t dead! In fact, customer email addresses are found in almost any customer dataset.

• IP address - for omnichannel outreach, marketers often require the customer’s IP address so they can send digital adverts via connected devices. As customers shop online more and more frequently, it’s important that businesses can contact them online.

Spend
A customer’s spending habits are extremely useful for businesses. For starters, understanding payment methods is important because businesses need to implement the payment option their customer prefers. Knowing how much a customer typically pays for products or services enables companies to develop intelligent pricing strategies. Furthermore, customer spend also reveals how often an individual purchases a product or service. From here, marketers can build segments, such as regular buyers, new customers, or unlikely customers. They can then target adverts based on how much customers in each segment are likely to spend and how frequently they’re looking to buy.

Loyalty
Like spending habits, customer loyalty can reveal a lot about individual purchase behaviour. Customers can be grouped according to whether they’re a loyal customer, new customer, dissatisfied customer etc. For brands, this intelligence is important because it enables them to calculate competition. If a customer is extremely loyal to one brand of grocery store, for example, it’d be difficult to win them over to another service. In these instances, customer data allows businesses to predict risks and avoid expensive, unsuccessful outreach campaigns.

What are the sources of Customer Data?

There are various sources of customer data. The most common are:

• Mobile geolocation signals
• E-commerce sites
• E-receipts
• Census records
• Public records e.g. mortgage filings
• Customer lifestyle surveys

The main thing to make sure of when buying customer data is that it’s been sourced using privacy-assured and customer consented methods.

Where can I buy Customer Data?

Data providers and vendors listed on Datarade sell Customer Data products and samples. Popular Customer Data products and datasets available on our platform are Bright Data | eCommerce Data - Global Coverage - Pricing Data, Seller Ratings Data, Customer Reviews Data by Bright Data, E-commerce Reviews dataset - analyse customer sentiment & competitors by TagX, and List of Companies Using Stripe 2023 | Stripe Customers List | 280K List of Stripe User Worldwide | 100% Real-Time Verified Data by Lead for Business.

How can I get Customer Data?

You can get Customer Data via a range of delivery methods - the right one for you depends on your use case. For example, historical Customer Data is usually available to download in bulk and delivered using an S3 bucket. On the other hand, if your use case is time-critical, you can buy real-time Customer Data APIs, feeds and streams to download the most up-to-date intelligence.

What are similar data types to Customer Data?

Customer Data is similar to Audience Data, Social Media Data, Consumer Credit Rating Data, Panel Survey Data, and Psychographic Data. These data categories are commonly used for Audience Analytics and 360-Degree Customer View.

What are the most common use cases for Customer Data?

The top use cases for Customer Data are Audience Analytics, 360-Degree Customer View, and Competitor Analysis.