Email addresses are a pretty good place to start.

An email address may be all you need to start identifying who your customers really are. You wouldn’t think an email address would tell you much about them, other than whether they like Hotmail or GMail, or whether they haven’t changed it since high school. However, your customer’s email address is really a great gateway to learning more about them.

Using their email, you can send them surveys. You can ask them to update their personal information on your website. Or, you can even Google their email and aggregate the information you find.

But now, thanks to Flowtown, there is another method to enhance your customer dataset.

By entering one of your customer’s emails into Flowtown, it instantly searches the web to determine their name, sex, occupation, age bracket, location, and social networks they belong to. So, all of the sudden, rockstar101@hotmail.com actually means something!

One downside I can think of is Flowtown only seems to provide information for individuals who have their email addresses associated with social networks/online profiles. So you are unlikely to find information pertaining to every single email on your database. However, as people become more liberal in their use of social media and giving of their personal information, I’m sure you’ll find information pertaining to a good percentage of it.

For many businesses, what Flowtown provides is all you may need before starting to segment your database.

So try it—run Flowtown on your database. And then the next time you think about sending your customers a survey, or building an exhausting form on your website to collect their name, age, and occupation—try to keep things a little simpler. Just ask for their email, and that should be a pretty good place to start.