Do it now

If you are a small start-up business, you must create a customer database.  No ifs, no buts. Every person that has been in contact with your company needs to be registered, logged and recorded. 

Why? Because as your business grows and expands, this database becomes very valuable to you. You are able to know who is your customer, what they have bought from you and crucially, what you can offer them in the future. Don’t wait till later – do it now.

Establish a communication method

You must first establish how you want to communicate with your customers and prospects – will it primarily be by email, phone, letter or direct mail piece?  Once you have an idea of this you can then put together the structure of the marketing database.  

For example, if your customer communication is going to be primarily via email, the database needs to be built to that end. Yes, you can add postal and telephone details, but the primary communication tool will play a large part in the structure, look and feel of your database.

Segment your customers

Put customers together in categories and segments so you can target them accordingly. If you make furniture, rank customers in categories such as ‘armchair’, ‘sofa’, ‘tables’, ‘furnishings’ etc. 

This means that not only is your data filed more sensibly, it also means that you can communicate with and make special offers to certain categories of customers. 

Record date of purchase

You must record the date of a customer purchase (Data Recency): the more recent a customer the more likely you can up-sell, cross-sell or otherwise successfully sell further products to them. 

Therefore, it is crucial that the date of customer contact is recorded prominently on your database. The fresher the customer, the fresher the data and the more valuable that person will be to you. 

Appoint a database specialist

Once you know how you want to communicate with your customers, how you will segment the data and also know the recency of that data, ask a database specialist to build a database for you. 

Don’t buy off the shelf at a high street retailer. Why? Your business is unique and the data you have is unique. It needs to be organised in a way that works for you and is easy to manage. A database specialist can help you with this, and at a competitive rate. 

Partnership

Now make the database company your ongoing business partner. The database specialist will advise you on how best to use the database, how to manage it and also how to evaluate that data in an intuitive way.  

Modern companies ask their database company to host the database for them and access to the data is via the web and a secure password system. The costs for doing all of the above is extremely competitive and will make managing and getting value from your database much more effective.

De-duplicate

Duplication is when a person has bought more than one product, changed address or when other family members have bought from you i.e. a person’s name or address might be on your database two or three times over and you need to purge and clean your database to ensure that a person or address is recorded once and once only. 

This reduces wastage and ensures people only hear from you once, rather than two or three times. Your database partner can do this and also advise you on using other database cleaning tools such as mortality files and mailing preference service (mail opt-out) files.

Job done!

All the hard work of creating a customer database has now been done and you will start reaping the rewards – you can target both customers and prospects with highly selective offers and also reduce wastage, particularly if you use direct mail. 

By using a specialist database provider, you will have got the most from your customer data and you will be freed up to do what you do best – running your company!

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By Jed Mooney  on   Nov 14,2008

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Keywords

customer database    communications    customers    outsourcing   

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