database marketing

The need to for an organisation to ‘market’ itself, or its products or services is universal. It is also not restricted to private sector, sales-oriented companies; any membership-based organisation or charity is similar in the sense that it seeks to stimulate interest in the enterprise and its objectives, thus the strategies that need to be employed are broadly the same. In terms of stimulating enquiries, customers can be either those that may already have responded to an approach, or actually dealt with or bought from you in the past (call these prospects) and those whose status is unknown (call these targets). Assuming your offering lends itself to ‘repeat business’, then in marketing to prospects your chances of success will invariably be much higher, since the more you know about a data subject the more easily you can ‘retain’ them.

Either way, there are several keys to success: First, specify your target audience as accurately as possible, otherwise you’ll end up with a database that either a) is too restrictive or b) contains useless dross, wasting resources and alienating your data subjects. Second, ensure that the database containing your target groups is subdivided or classified in some useful way. Third, strive to establish contact with your audience in as targeted a fashion as possible. Your overall objective should always be to ensure that as many people as possible receive the material they should, and that as few of them that shouldn’t, don’t. By using ABC you will benefit from our experience in segmenting data so as to achieve the best results.

A vital part of your direct marketing strategy should be to build up a picture of your data subjects using whatever information is available to you: location, age, budget, previous history eg. what they have enquired about or bought in the past. Using this information, your database marketing exercises should target your data subjects in a way that ideally offers them some incremental advantage (click here for an example of maximising business from existing customers).

Having made contact with your customers, it is vital that you monitor their responses — or lack of them. It is genuinely necessary for you to log NO response as well as positive responses, since continuing to ‘blitz’ customers that fail to respond will waste you time, effort and cost at best, and irritate these potential customers at worst. One way of keeping prospects, or even targets, ‘on side’ is to continually seek confirmation from them that what they are receiving is worthwhile — both to them and to you. By using ‘negative feedback’ you can ensure that they have ‘opted in’ to your approaches ie. you should offer them the opportunity to opt out; their failure to do so can be taken to mean that they are content to be mailed. This is especially important with e-mail broadcasts that could otherwise fall foul of anti-spam legislation, not just spam filters (click here for more info). And if you’re marketing to your existing customers then it’s doubly important to ensure that your overtures are welcome, ideally in the form of incentives to retain them as valued customers (click here for an example of this approach).

ABC has undertaken many database marketing projects over the years, a hallmark of which is that we always strive to look ahead and to ‘future-proof’ the data at our clients’ disposal. Thus when new approaches are devised, or new offerings made available, we can respond more quickly to these developments. A simple example of this would be canvass areas of interest from customers, that may be unrelated to the approach in hand, ideally using simple tickboxes on a pre-populated web form.

An effective database marketing strategy will be based on a very similar set of factors to stakeholder communications, namely:

• a database that is
  – as comprehensive in scope as possible
  – kept in a permanent state of readiness
  – effectively segmented so as to enable targeted rather than scattergun exercises
  – structured to be able to record feedback, especially orders and sales enquiries
• be adapted to the needs of data subjects, whether these are e-mail broadcasts or postal mailshots, both of which should be personalised
• a rigorous history of enquiries or literature requests, orders or sales, in order to be able to structure future marketing communications; the classic example of this genre is the Internet retailer amazon (“If you liked X, you’ll love Y”)

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