Understand customers to increase your profits

Do you know who your most profitable customers are?
Do you know who your most profitable customers are? Our regular customers who buy often, but spend less on each purchase? Or is it rather those customers who buy less frequently, but by the items that give you a high-profit margin?
Know your clientele well
Being able to take advantage of this knowledge is a very important quality for all companies. The better you know your current customers, the more you can do to increase their purchases and incentivize them to spend at your business.
As important as the above, this knowledge can also help you focus your marketing strategy on those aspects in which it is possibly most effective, thus obtaining more sales opportunities for your company.
Create a profile of your customers
Building customer profiles doesn't have to be a complicated task. If your business has been in business for some time, you already have a lot of information about your customers. Now, understanding them better can strengthen and improve your relationship with them.
Here are some recommendations to create a good database about your clients.
Individuals
Register where they live, phone numbers of companies and addresses, suggest number, how they found out about your business and who recommended it.
Companies
Look at the type of company, its size, its activity sector, its suppliers. Find out how the owner or manager found out about your business.
In addition, keep a record of the following items:
 Data of all transactions: type of purchase, date, amount and payment method.
 How customers shop: online, over the phone or in person.
 How much time is spent with each customer on the phone, in person, or on duty trips.
 All communications with clients, which must be included in their profile.

advice
Any information that helps you establish stronger relationships with your customers and detect future sales opportunities should be included in your database.
How to take advantage of this information about customers?
You can use these detailed customer profiles in many ways. Some possibilities are, for example, sending greeting cards for birthdays and Christmas parties, or a simple gesture of thanks for dealing with your company.
Depending on the type of business, you can also remind them of a review, maintenance, cleaning or service renewal dates.
Use the database to group individual profiles by market segment, in order to later create specific offers for each of them. Here are some of the ways you can use the information in your database to better understand customers and increase the profitability of your business.
Recurring clients
All companies like to have a stable income stream. The fixed inflow of money each week or each month provides that necessary liquidity. Now, are these clients really profitable? For example, you may have a regular customer, but it is time consuming for your company and requires a lot of dedication, which may ultimately be less profitable.
Analyze if you can reduce the costs of attending your regular customers without compromising the quality of the service. For example, you could direct them to the website when they call or want to ask the staff about something.
Talk to your staff and take advantage of their knowledge to find out what questions and queries customers ask the most. Using this information, create a list of frequently asked questions and post it on your website. Make sure your customers know it exists and can easily find it.
Less frequent customers
Analyze the consumption pattern of customers who buy less frequently. These customers can be more profitable if they buy items with a high markup and consume less time.
Survey these less frequent customers to learn more about their needs. Based on the results and the consumption patterns identified, are there induced or cross-sell opportunities?
Leave your customers less profitable

Leaving or rejecting a customer may seem like illogical advice, but sometimes it's best to remove certain customers from your list.
In fact, having a customer who spends a lot of money may sound great, but if that customer consumes more of your company's resources (staff time, technology or material) than they are paying for, it is not really a productive thing.
With the help of your accountant, calculate the cost and hourly rate of your employees. If you don't keep track of time spent in service, consider implementing a system that does. In this way, you can more easily discover which customers end up being more expensive.
These are just some of the ways that a database can help you define consumption patterns in your business and increase profits.
In conclusion, once you know who your most profitable customers are and know them well, you can decide how to use your resources more effectively to find new customers.