Database Marketing is a popular way to gather and store specific information about your visitors, clients or prospects. Stored in a database software program like Access, SQL, Excel, and MySQL, the useful information is then used in advertising and marketing efforts, mainly to save time and money by targeting your promotional efforts to your best prospects or customers.
The type of information you collect for your database depends upon the products and services you offer. Generally, the high the selling price, the more information you would gather and use.
A solid foundation generally begins with contact and purchase information and birth date. Once harvested, it’s time to put the information into action. And here are some of the top database marketing techniques that do just that.
1. Appended Data
More in-depth data may be desired for business to business (B2B) communications like SIC code, number of employees and annual sales, for bidding projects. Or for one-on-one relationships with clients like for realtors and insurance products, people can append data to name and address files, seeking out income, age, home value, length of residence, number of children and over 30 other bits of info.
The resulting data is then used in all types of well targeted marketing campaigns. Appended data can be done in-house or outsourced with larger companies that have more complete databases.
2. Website Data
Some websites offer a means to gather their own data, too, through the use of cookies that gather information from website visitors.
This marketing method is popular for allowing Internet marketers a means to learn more about who visited their sites, which pages they searched and for how long, and many other site statistics. These are then used for their product and service creation, packaging and pricing.
3. Email Communications & Tracking
Email surveys, customer reply forms and shipping documents that use tracking numbers and share them with the clients are excellent examples of database marketers in action.
By using this type of tracking, companies can improve their customer-client relationships, resulting in increased sales and customer retention, and earn more about their clients in the process for future sales and retention efforts.
In summary, by using Database Marketing and techniques tailored to fit your own products and services, you can gather and store targeted information about your visitors, clients or prospects.
And you can save time and money by targeting your promotional efforts to your best prospects or customers with the information.
