Customer Database
A customer database allows a business to better understand its customers and to refine its marketing and customer activities. By creating a customer database you can consolidate information that you already know about your customer, in order to find out information that you don’t know in order to prevent the waste of valuable marketing information.
Businesses are increasingly using a customer database to manage customer relations, to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. A customer database can be used to highlight trends through the collection of important information and data such as
-
Contact information - name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and names and job titles of relevant personnel.
-
Customer purchase history - what they have bought from you, when, and from which salesperson.
-
Customer service and complaint history.
-
Customer account history.
Getting the best out of your customer database information:
Analysing the data in your customer database will allow you to discover your most profitable customers, and the traits they share. This will help give you a clear target for your marketing strategies. A customer database provides a greater clarity for customer categorization.
By using the information gleamed from a customer database, more efficient marketing strategies can be designed. The information allows you to identifying similar groups of clients to target for particular marketing methods, such as telephone, direct mail, email or face to face, allowing you to identify those most susceptible to specific marketing methods. You might, for example, want to reward regular profitable clients with exclusive promotions. On the other side of the spectrum you may want to target customers who you have not had business from in a while.
A customer database can help you measure the impact of your marketing strategies and help prevent the wastage of resources on promotional targets who wont return your marketing investment.
|