BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR CUSTOMER THRU DATABASE MARKETING
A MARKETING SYSTEM THAT BUILDS RELATIONSHIPS
A relationship is something that is special in any context. If you can develop and nurture a relationship between your business and your customers, you will have very loyal customers. While we can can obviously do this one by one with select customers, the trick is to develop a marketing/operations information system that turns many prospects into customers that feel a relationship with our company. Creating and then maintaining a marketing database is a great way to grow your business and realize the power of the TRACK methodology.
Another critical reason to develop this marketing system is that it relies less on any one individual (including yourself). It becomes a business intelligence tool that helps separate the business from you individually.
A successful marketing database will:
Here's a high level outline of the process we will cover:
DEVELOPMENT:
Develop an initial marketing database consisting of any current prospects and clients as well as a purchased database of new prospects. To identify new prospects you can either review your current customers to identify attributes that you can select new people based on, or you can make educated assumptions about your target market based on your experience in the business. Add a field to track the source of the name. Some names will be provided for a one year license period and you will need to know when the name expires.
You should put all the names into a database that is accessible by all members of your business that "touch" the prospects and customers. This would include your marketing, sales, accounting, and customer service functions.
ADD FIELDS:
Add fields to your database to track personal attributes about each person. These additional fields could include ones related to the sales process as well as personal information. You will likely add fields in the future as you think of new things to track or new data becomes available to you.
Sales related fields include: date of last contact, qualify score, needs, mass mailing, mass emailing, title, send gift?, next step for us, next date of contact, sales amount, last sale date, and salesman ID.
Personal information fields include: email address, fax number, cards, personal interests, children's names, birth date.
You can also purchase additional data about your prospects and customers. For example, with business contacts, you can append sales information, company size data, and industry codes. For consumer names, you can append geo-demographic data and you may even be able to acquire some individual data from certain sources. These append data sources will provide you with rich data for mining to determine patterns and help you learn more about your current customers, and therefore more insight into finding new prospects to turn into customers.
UPDATES:
Update your database after each contact with prospects and customers, if new information is learned. If you are the type that loves to sell and be out there with people, it is very unlikely that you will be motivated to spend time in front of your computer updating a database. This is one of the reasons that most sales people don't spend much time with paperwork or computer updates. You will have to find a realistic balance between no updates and updating all the time.
In some businesses, you can automate the update process. For example, you could use a membership/discount card and have the computer track transactions automatically.
Another popular way to gather new data for your marketing database is to go right to the horses mouth! You can conduct surveys - informal or formal - that gather key information about each person. You can gain valuable insight into the needs, desires, and general mindset of individual customers by simply asking for their feedback. Always offer something for their time.
If you don't take the time to keep your database up to date, you will loose much of the value and never realize the true potential of the marketing database.
PERSONAL CONTACTS:
Use your database to provide personalized content for emails, faxes, telephone calls, and direct mail. Once you have fields in your database, you can use them to personalize mass communications to make them appear more targeted. For example, you could use the person's first name in a mass email to make the email appear to be written to just them. If you include their company name in the body of the email, you are going a step further toward creating a personal connection and leveraging the marketing database.
If you have collected birth dates, you could do a monthly direct mail campaign that offers something special for their birthday. I have seen a free dinner at a local restaurant coupon offered as a gift by an insurance broker. When you view the fine print you see that it is really a buy one get one free coupon, which on second thought isn't such a great gift. You of course could spend a few dollars on your better customers (you can code customers based on their value to your business) and provide a set of free movie tickets. No matter what you were to give, just the fact that you "remembered" their birthday is worth something. The more personal the contact (hand signing a card for example), the better the impact. Remember that the point of this marketing database is to provide you with information that you can use to foster personal relationships with people.
CROSS AND UP SELL:
Look for cross and up sell opportunities. Once you know who is buying what from you, you can start to make links and find other opportunities to sell to people.
In cross selling for example, people who buy product X also tend to need service Y. These 2 items may go together naturally. You can do a special promotion to all buyers of product X with a discount coupon for service Y. (Honda Civic buyers would likely buy oil changes).
In up selling, you may see that people who buy product B would be likely to move up to product B+ within 2 years. You could offer a special move up offer to help move them along this path. You would highlight the additional features of the new product. (People who rent video tapes might be likely candidates to look into DVD players as they desire to upgrade their movie experience).
ANALYZE & REPORT:
You can report and analyze based on a variety of fields in the database to determine what works well for you and use data-mining to uncover more insight. You can learn a lot from reviewing your data. You may see patterns that show people in certain geographic areas buy more than others. You could find out age is a factor in the buying decision.
You can also provide valuable customer reports that show customers that fit any profile. For example, you could create a report of all customers who purchased something over one year ago and then either call them or survey them to find out why they have not been back this past year.
There is a huge variety of possible factors to study. As you put more information into the database, the amount available for data mining grows. This is especially true if you include customer purchase information in the database.
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