At first it might look irrelevant and you might ask "What has .Net Profile to do with my optical business?", just  sit back, relax and read on as it will be evident that it is relevant.

Around 5 years back while I was pursuing my graduation degree, I opened an optical showroom, it was one heck of time to juggle between college and look after the business. Yet somehow I managed it, this log is not about how professionally/successfully  I managed my business; but it's about what I learnt out of it.

While I was busy with my college I used to spent lot of time thinking of different strategies to develop my business. During the second year out of the blue many such showrooms started to pop up and there was tough competition, people started slashing their prices of spectacles and the business started to soar. Now the business was evenly divided among the showrooms.

Many showroom owners came up with special discounts, spent lavishly on promotion and started to attract more customers. Some showrooms roped in professional advertising agency with good models to be their ambassador. All this made me insecure and due to capital constraints we were not spending on advertisements and had to rethink our business strategy.

As I was pursuing Bachelor's of Business Administration I had the knowledge on marketing management and came up with a great idea which really worked.

Before I talk about it, let me put forth few questions to you.

Q. To impress a girl what do you do?

A. You try to know what she likes and gift her.

Q. To impress an HR what do you speak?

A. You speak what he wants to listen to.

Do you see a pattern and something hidden in the above answers, well in order to impress a girl or HR you need to know what they like and so you need to collect information about their likes and dislikes  and use that information to your advantage.

That's what I did; I started collecting information about my customers. Every time I got a new customer I collected their address, phone number, date of birth, anniversaries, etc. So how do collecting customer information improve my business, key here is what you do with that information. I used that data to analyze and send mails to remind them of regular eye check-up, special discounts for being our customer, wishing them on their birthday, etc.

Also it was not just about collecting info in a diary but even my mind was collecting data like storing customers image and recognizing and greeting them with their name when they pay their next visit.

Don't you feel good when you visit a coffee pub and the waiter or manager smiles at you and greets you with your name as if indirectly telling you "I know you, you are my valuable customer", especially when you are with your friends/GF

These little gestures proved to be steroids to my business and the business started to boom again; the new customers were actually my old customers relatives, friends, neighbors, etc. So I made "my customers, my ambassadors" note the quote my dear marketing guys you won't find this in any books or research papers. My customers were marketing for me and my business was back into action.

Little did I know after around 5 years I will be doing this again, but this time I am not going to collect the information one-on-one but through the Profile object provided by .Net.

Huh...you will be thinking at last this guy is talking about Profile object.

Read Story of Profiling part 2