CUSTOMER PROFILE REPORT
Gain Insight Into Your Customers
with a Customer Profile Report
Customer Profile Report – What Sets Us Apart
Customer Profile Reports (aka Look Alike Reports or Portrait) provide insight into your customer-base for hundreds of demographic, interest, purchase behavior data elements and segmentation models. By analyzing and appending data to your customers you will be able to clearly determine how your customers compare to individuals and households your market area. So, the look alike report does two things:
- It provides the absolute profile of your customers (e.g., share of customers by income range)
- It compares your customers to the local market (using the Market Index for each element range)
What sets us apart is that our Team has decades of experience running dozens of Customer Profile Reports. We know the advantages and limitations and how to get the most out of the analysis without drawing conclusions that are not supported by the data.
So if you want accurate insights and a great value, be sure to get your Customer Profile Report and review session from Inbound Insight.
Customer Profile Report – Key Benefits
If you have not yet quantified your customer demographics yet, a Look Alike Report will provide highly useful insights. You get the following key benefits:

- Having statistically-valid, quantitative knowledge of your customers is invaluable. (The reports provide a test of statistical validity called the “Z-Score” so you can be confident in the results.)
- Learn the differences between best customers and average customers, or among customers for different types of products or services
- Use the knowledge of how your customers differ from the typical customer in your market area to establish best target audience characteristics
- Standardized reports can be turned around in 1 to 2 business days and are very reasonably priced.
- The data used to enhance customer records is high-quality and updated monthly.
Customer Profile Report – Background
The standard Customer Portrait report analyzes 25 different demographic data elements including an excellent life stage segmentation model. In addition, the look-alike analysis includes more than 40 buying categories and more than 140 interests. Here are some of the demographic variables included in this report:
- Age
- Income
- Gender
- Marital Status
- Number of Children
- Interests (130+ categories)
- Buying Activity (40+ categories)
- Ethnicity
- Country of Origin
- Net Worth
- Home Market Value
- Dwelling Type
- Home Ownership
- Length of Residence
- Home Equity Available
- Credit Card Usage
- Political Party
- Green Living
- Vehicle Type
- Personicx
Visualizing Your Data with a Customer Profile Report
Customer Profile Reports provide simple visuals along with tables with shares and penetration indices. The chart below shows that customers are relatively more prevalent than other households in the target market in the $40,000 to $49,999 income range (the green bar is higher than the orange bar). The ratio of height between the two bars is also described by the Market Penetration Index.

Market Penetration Index
The Market Penetration Index or MPI is a measure of how much your customers differ from the reference market area relative to specific demographic elements or ranges. MPI is calculated as 100 x the ratio of customer share in a range divided by prospect share. An MPI of 100 = average (typical market research practice is to normalize average to equal 100). So for, example, for the $40,000 to $49,999 income range in the chart above, MPI = 146.
The sample report provided at the bottom of this page includes the following table of MPIs relative to Personicx Clusters.

Any MPI greater than 120 is significantly above average. In the case above the highest MPIs are very high with nine above 300 and one above 700 indicating that there is a strong connection with the product or service being offered and these types of households.
We’ve created dozens of these reports for clients over the past decade and know how to interpret them. We will teach you and your team about the Market Penetration Index and Z-Score and provide a summary of results along with a full hour of consultation for no additional fee.
The report itself is about 100 pages long and in .pdf format. The flat fee is just $600 for both the report and the consultation.
Disadvantages of Customer Profile Reports
We are here to advise you, so we will tell you about both pros and cons of each solution we offer. Here are some points to be aware of:
- A Customer Profile Report may not include all of the key data elements you care about.
- The “index-based” analysis is performed on a single dimension at a time.
- These are “descriptive”, not “predictive” reports. This means that the key metrics are based on simple math, not advanced statistical analysis or machine learning.
Despite these points, Customer Profile Reports provide a great starting point for profiling customers and prioritizing both targeting and data selection for analytic models and we highly recommend performing this foundational analysis of your customers.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Report
We recommend analyzing customers overall, as well as by key customer segments. For example, you may wish to understand how customers segments differ by:
- Product line – how do key demographics differ by Product A vs. B vs. C?
- Region – how do customer demographics differ by key region within the U.S.?
To maintain a high level of statistical validity (the “z-score”) you should submit at least 5,000 name and address records. Also be sure to specify the geographical area to use as the reference (e.g., total U.S., certain states, specific counties or ZIP Codes) area and only include records in your file that are within that geography.
Customer Profile Report – Use Cases
Here are some key use cases for customer profile analyses:
- Understanding customer profile based on a wide variety of demographic elements and/or Personicx
- Creating groupings of clusters for common messaging
- Prioritizing which segments to reach out to
- Creating look alike target audiences for lists and digital outreach
- Comparing existing customer segment profiles (e.g., customers vs. prospects, customers of Product A vs. Product B, customers in Region A vs. Region B).
Customer Profile Report – Case Study
A high-end patio systems installer wanted to know the best look alike audience for customers in different regions. It knew that wealth and home values differed significantly and needed to be able to reach the top 50% of customers based on local conditions.
By running Customer Demographics report in each region, our client was able to pinpoint the specific Net Worth and Home Market Values to use to target local audiences.