When we first engage with a client it is not unusual that their only information about customers is pretty basic. You don’t want to be asking too many questions and risk them not registering with your site but you want information to classify their business. We discuss progressive profiling with clients where you ask one or two more questions each time a customer engages but even better is to use other sources to start to enrich their information.
We recommend getting industry information and the two major sources are SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and NAICS (North American Industrial Classification). SIC has been around far longer and several entities, think SEC, still use them. But NAICS is more descriptive and has more granularity and we prefer to work with them. They are means to map between the respective codes and you will find several states where when you register or file your incorporation documents will request your NAICS code. And as the name implies, NAICS is only used in North American and has no correlation to UK or European classification system.
So why do you care and why should you start collecting this information? If you want to do better targeting, the more you know about your customers/clients the easier it will be to target. EscapeVelocity will provide you with tables to map your accounts into the the general business categories and then you can further profile your customers each time they engage with you. We then use this information to drive micro campaigns specifically targeted to a NAICS entity. But before we develop these campaigns we first have to analyze your customer data to understand where is your sweet spot. And that will be another forthcoming blog.
Have a great one!
Jill