6. database
marketing
It starts with a list. There's a lot more to it, and more still
to doing it well. But relationship marketing starts with something straightforward:
a list of your customers.
There's nothing more important than knowing who your customers
are. They buy from you; they keep you in business. It's six times easier
to keep one you've got than recruit a new one, and 20% of them bring you
80% of your revenues. (Retaining just 5% of those you lose could double
your profits.) Database marketing is about reaching those customers - again
and again. Profitably.
Even if those customers aren't on the web, a web-based database is a
great place to keep them. A web application - Redpump's designed several -
lets your people add each customer contact to a single, consolidated customer
profile. And if they are on the web, those customers build these profiles
themselves. (It's behind AOL's
gigabytes of consumer preferences and Amazon's
recommendations.)
A database with a web front-end is the ideal one-to-one communications
platform. It doesn't have to be big or pricey. All it has to do is make sure
each communication, every campaign
adds to a customer relationship. And building one takes six steps.
First, create the list. A one-dimensional spreadsheet
of names and numbers. Look at the list, see the patterns in the data. It may
give you ideas for smarter ways of connecting with them. But before anything
else starts, it needs that list.
Second, web-enable the list. Add on multiple
tags and descriptors that define the data - metadata. Make the information
in it real-time, imported in from other sources. Your list becomes two-dimensional
and up-to-date.
Third, do something with it. Write that campaign,
execute that strategy. With all responses directed into the list. Your total
brand equity can be defined as what the people on that list think of you.
Fourth, remember it for next time. Attach every
response to the customer making it - let him do it in real time over the web
if possible. Your spreadsheet has become three-dimensional, a database. Customer
relationships, not lists of contacts. Not enough response? Do a different
campaign. Change your marketing strategy.
Fifth, look for patterns. What's the shape of
the database? Does any aspect of customer behaviour correlate with any other
attribute, like age or gender? If teenage girls talk to you Saturday afternoons
while young couples do it Wednesdays, you've got the basis for two separate
marketing campaigns.
Each aimed at a different group, but with the same objective: persuading
people to buy more.
Sixth and last, build the relationship. Let each
customer response define how you communicate with him next. (Ten campaigns
customisable in ten ways means ten billion possible combinations of each communication,
enough to give a custom response to everyone on the planet.) It's become four-dimensional:
with length, breadth, depth, and time. And it'll make every customer feel
like your only customer.
Most call this Customer Relationship Management, but however you label
it, it's marketing using a database. And Redpump knows how to do it. Next: brand
building.