Table of Contents
Most businesses get their primary leads from their social media promotions and digital marketing endeavors.
Have you ever thought about the ways most websites utilize the data from the marketing campaigns? After all, no amount of vigilance is enough to find actionable data from social media interactions directly and to use them right on the spot for completing the sales cycle. A company can have a few hundred clients or a few thousand depending on the size of their market. A standard company website or e-commerce site should be able to feed the data into a database for further processes, including data management and data mining.
All websites need a database. Sites using WordPress can easily utilize the opportunity to create and maintain a database with the help of ready-to-use plug-ins. Any vital customer interaction and transaction details, you can directly include them in the database for future reckoning. These databases apparently help with organization, but they can do a lot more than that. They can help you get a look at a customer’s monthly shopping tendencies and their last shopping behavior. Databases are like a map of your customer’s mind, except you might have 1000 customers and your database has the power to store the complete information on all 1000 customers at one go.
WordPress is the present and the future of websites
A WordPress customer database is a prime solution to almost all kinds of businesses that have chosen WordPress engines to power their websites. E-commerce websites and service websites benefit from the creation of customer databases. This gives the owners the power to visit customer data at all times and from any device. A WordPress database allows you to log customer data like email by default. You need a database for your website to utilize the unexplored goldmine of data you are currently sitting on, without spending a fortune.
You can take help from any of the several plug-ins to begin your database venture. Choosing a simple plug-in that supports easy edit and intuitive design options will save you a lot of time. There will be no learning curve, and you will be able to store your customer information without any limitation. Your database plug-in should offer you flexible fields and tables. The database should support edit of field names. In fact, in-database search options that come with several plug-ins should be able to help you search for necessary information.
Creating your WP database with a plug-in
Any flexible and user-friendly CRM plug-in will come with a plethora of options and settings. You will need to use only a few of them in the beginning to create the initial tables for your database. You can change the order of database entry displays. Most often the order is – newest to oldest. You can change it to alphabetical order or ascend as per a certain value. Horizontal scrolling is sometimes necessary for tables with multiple fields.
In the admin area, you can find out who has access to your database. Your plug-in should be able to demarcate the database admin from other users. It should be able to allow users to assume the Editor’s role with the right authentication and it should allow the editors to add or remove or change entries as per requirement. As an admin, you can export your entire database right from here as a .csv file.
Ideally, your database plug-in should be as simple as that one. The Participant’s Database plug-in, Database Browser, and WP-DBManager are some of the most popular WordPress database building and management extensions that today’s website admins prefer.
Good plug-ins come with edit-friendly features
It is quite accurate to think of your WordPress customer database as a seemingly never-ending table! Your plug-in should also be able to help you set up and organize these tables. Plug-ins like Participant’s Database gives the users an option of accessing preset fields like emails, contact numbers, and addresses. However, your plug-in should also allow you to add new fields that can support the collection of more data. Adding a field should be a one-step deal and restrict the data type as per your requirement. For example – a field for zip code in the US should only contain (6 digits) numbers.
Adding new participants to your existing table
Once you have your WordPress customer database is ready, you might want to help it grow as fast as possible. This will need the help of new participants. In case of a private database, you will need to ensure that your plug-in is capable of protecting the existing information and the users. For all private databases, every data expert recommends the manual inclusion of new participants. Go to your database plug-in and select your add new participant/entry tab. Once you see the participant info dialog box, fill it out with relevant information about your new entry. Click on submit or save to return to the main view of your database.
Some companies want their customers and clients to complete their entry. In that case, you can avail several shortcode packs to find the correct shortcode that will display the sign-up form. Finding the right shortcode or collection of shortcodes is much easier for WordPress users due to the opensource nature of the builder cum CMS. You can visit the forum to look for the shortcode that will allow your users to create their entry. You can also use the [pdb_signup] shortcode for displaying a signup form.
Conclusion
Any good website builder and CMS platform support a website’s need to know their target customers. It is of prime importance to be able to know their pet peeves, shopping choices, and shipment preferences. To be able to pull data from the brink of time for your existing customers and to guide them towards the conversion step is of acute significance for any website.
