General

The traditional peak season for foreign trade in the second half of the year is the best time for foreign trade enterprises to develop foreign markets. There are many channels and ways to develop foreign trade customers. Today, let's talk about using customs data to develop customer sources.

What is customs data

Customs data refers to various import and export statistical data generated by the customs in fulfilling their import and export trade statistics functions. The task of customs statistics is to investigate, analyze, and supervise import and export goods, and provide statistical services. Customs will regularly release import and export statistics, warning and monitoring data. The data will be specific to a certain industry or commodity.

Select professional buyers

In the international market, the number of buyers in most industries is very large, but not every one is suitable for oneself. The one that suits oneself is the best. Confirming whether the customer is a professional buyer is the key to selecting a buyer first. The general query process is to screen buyers who have strong relevance to their company's products based on product descriptions and HS CODE, and then compare the number of purchases of purchased product types and products to further screen and confirm the buyer's professional level.

Mastering buyer procurement patterns

After finding a professional buyer, analyze their purchasing habits. By tracking transaction records through cross-border search, it is crucial to identify the relationship and scale between product quantity, weight, settlement amount, shipment time, replenishment time, and enterprise graph, understand purchasing preferences, and recommend one's own products to buyers at the best contact time. This can improve the buyer's response rate and thereby improve the success rate of signing orders.

Peer competitors

For matching buyers who have already been analyzed, be sure to pay attention to their existing suppliers. It is best to wait for cross-border search to find the existing suppliers of the buyer, and based on product, price, quality and other information, select peers with similar market strength, high price, and quality, or peers with similar quality and price. Let's get to know both the past and current customers of our peers, and focus on paying attention to the lost and new buyers of our peers. Based on this, we can contact the buyers again, otherwise why would they abandon their original suppliers.

About contact information

The contact information included in the customs data includes name and email, which can be directly used. Additionally, some customers fill in their own phone numbers, email addresses, etc., which are relatively small in quantity. If they encounter them, they can be counted one by one and can also be directly contacted. Other methods can be integrated with cross-border search (one click search+trade data+foreign trade email+search for fish), Bing, Google, third-party social media, etc., to match and retrieve contact information later on the Internet.

Multiple communication methods in parallel

At present, many foreign trade salespeople in China are still in the stage of developing customers only through email, and they need to learn to use various social media and instant messaging tools. To put it in perspective, if you receive a promotional email, it is highly likely that you will not reply. However, if someone adds you on WeChat and greets you, the probability of our reply will be much higher. There are WeChat in China and WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. in foreign countries. Cross border search includes Soyu and Foreign Trade Mail, which can be mass email marketing or mass social media marketing, Both have beautifully crafted templates that can be used.

Combining existing development methods

There has always been an issue of information asymmetry in international trade. Foreign customers know a lot about us, but foreign trade enterprises do not know much about foreign customers. Customs data can solve this problem and make market information more transparent.

If there are inquiries from B2B platforms, independent websites, Google search for customers, social media operations, exhibitions, and other methods, you can also enter the customer's name into the corresponding search box for cross-border search, and check whether there are transaction records through customs data. If there are records, you can check the customer's previous purchase situation, existing supplier information, and other information. After making sufficient preparations, develop appropriate pricing strategies, and continue to communicate with the customer, Be aware of oneself and the enemy, and win every battle!

Of course, under the current epidemic, drought, strikes, and inflation, many international exhibitions are not going smoothly, and the quality of online inquiries is also decreasing. Using customs data to proactively attract customers and reserve resources is a good trend and opportunity.