With so much talk about new and innovative marketing approaches, make sure you're not overlooking the basic building blocks of smart marketing. Database marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses personalized communication to promote products or services to potential customers. Customer information is gathered, stored in, and drawn from a central database.
What Is Database Marketing?
Database marketing helps facilitate many marketing communication approaches, particularly direct marketing. Some of the most successful Internet marketers use it.
"The whole point of database marketing is to make sure that marketing communications are being directed toward the most receptive groups."
- Marketing-Schools.org
Here are the reasons why database marketing should matter to you.
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How Does It Help Your Overall Marketing Strategy?
Streamline your activities and information.
Let’s say you have gathered an impressive amount of data about your customer base, but have no way of managing or organizing it. Setting up a database will allow you to organize vast amounts of important information and pull lists of specifics, such as email addresses, phone numbers, past purchases, inquiries, demographic information and more. Need to know how many males, ages 30-50, bought a laptop from you in the past two years? You can easily find out.
Create targeted promotions.
By using the information in your database, you can send targeted promotions and sales to the most promising customers. For example, if you are a large online retailer and you're having a sale on books, you can send an email to customers who have specifically purchased fiction books from you in the past, and not to everyone who has ever ordered from your site. Targeted promotions are a much better use of time and resources.
Speaking of emails, can email signatures get you leads? Sure, they can. Check out how these companies do it.
Better predict your customers' behavior and actions.
Database marketing can help you analyze your customers' buying patterns and past behavior so that you can make better marketing decisions. For example, you can pinpoint sales trends based on what they bought in the past and predict which customers are likely to buy in the future as well as which products they might be interested in.
Track your marketing campaign's success.
One of the most important elements of any marketing campaign is tracking its success. Is email a better approach for your company or do your customers respond better to social media campaigns? You can gather metrics that matter and measure results that can be put to good use, such as a campaign that has both email and social media components targeted at two different qualified prospect groups.
If you're struggling with social media marketing, follow these 4 steps to overcome common challenges.
Save money.
As mentioned above, using this more streamlined approach saves on costs and resources. By targeting your message to customers who have purchased in the past, you are spending money on those more likely to buy from you again, not just casting a wide net and hoping for increased sales.
Information sharing
Did you know that you can buy or rent prospect lists? That’s right. If you're just getting started and need help with this type of marketing, you can buy email prospect lists to help you with a specific campaign or product launch.
Overall, a well rounded approach.
Make sure you're collecting quality information for your database. To achieve this successfully, you need to continually gather and analyze data about your customers, especially their buying history, habits and demographic information. The more useful data you have, the more successful your marketing campaigns will be.
Although DM offers great ROI, it's not the only approach. Using a cost-effective, intelligent combination of inbound marketing and outbound marketing (trade shows, cold calling) enables you to get the most out of all of your marketing efforts. It has a proven track record of success, so be sure to implement it into your marketing strategy.
Want to know more about how to boost your ROI? Make the most of your investments with this helpful and free marketing guide!
