Truly understanding your customers can be a struggle. But it doesn’t have to be.

At our Subscribed 2015 conference in May, Gigya’s Reeyaz Hamirani spoke about how important it is to leverage marketing strategies to understand your users. Perhaps a strategy for your company is to drive more people to your website and increase the level of activity and engagement. Or maybe you want them to actually buy your product. Whatever your ultimate marketing goal is make sure you leverage strategies to understand who your customers are as part of the process.

In Hamirani’s session, he cites Nike as a company who has done just that. The company’s goal was to drive more traceable activity to the website by having more users login whenever they used the company’s site. By allowing users to physically create their own Nike IDs, it in-turn incentivized customers to create an account. As a result, Nike not only increased user login by 74% but also understand its customer demographics and behaviors, developing a more 1-to-1 type of customer relationship.

In another industry, the Dallas Morning News opened commenting and sharing features on their online articles because they wanted to increase engagement across their online platforms. With these newly added functions, the paper saw a 92% increase in commenting activity and was able to gauge what types of articles they should push out moving forward.

When you have access to these types of information, you can target and tailor your communication. And when you can do that, that’s when relationships start to form. But where do you start and how do you know if you’re getting closer to this level of understanding your customers?

With success stories like Nike and Dallas Morning News, it’s your turn to examine your company’s level of customer understanding. Compare your results by checking out Hamirani’s Academy Guide The 4 Levels of Customer Understanding.