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Use Your Marketing Database as
a Central Location for ALL of your Marketing
Data
Do you have valuable marketing data in a
variety of systems throughout your organization?
Maybe you even have data outside of your
organization that contains marketing information
you’d love to get your hands on. Having all of
this marketing data is great, but can you access
it? Is it actionable? Can you pull a segmented
campaign list quickly and rerun it on-the-fly if
the counts are not what you expected? Can you
create customer profile and ROI analysis
reports? If not, your marketing data does not
reside in a central location that is easy for
direct marketers to access, in other words you
do not have a fully integrated marketing
database.
To learn more about what a fully
integrated marketing database can do for you,
read Does the Database you Use for Direct
Marketing Really Work? If your marketing
database has all of the capabilities listed in
this fact sheet, you have a fully integrated
marketing database. However, if your current
solution lacks a number of the listed marketing
database capabilities, you may find that basic
marketing tasks are difficult and sometimes even
painful. This is where the importance of a
central location or marketing database for all
of your marketing data comes into
play.
A central location to house pertinent
customer information such as where and how the
product was purchased, when and what was
purchased, dollar amount spent and customer
demographic and lifestyle information, to name a
few, gives direct marketers the ability to
create targeted marketing campaigns that their
audience will relate to and act on. How? The
ability to extract all marketing
data—from internal and external sources—allows
direct marketers to create a 3-dimensional
portrait of their customers. Marketers can
create this image because they have access to a
wide variety of detailed information about each
individual. This valuable insight lets direct
marketers determine the interests their
customers and prospects have, how they prefer to
be communicated to, what offers they are more
likely to respond to…the list goes on and on.
And ultimately direct marketers can pull
finely-tuned lists for their marketing
campaigns. For example, they can pull a list
that excludes people who have opt-ed out of the
specific marketing channel and include
individuals that have an interest in their
product or service and/or have characteristics
similar to their current customer base. A fully
integrated marketing database allows marketers
to integrate items such as the
following.
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Customer and/or prospect
data
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Multi-channel contact data
(e.g., postal address, email address, text
messaging, phone number, etc.)
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RFM (e.g., transactional data
and dates)
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Multi-level managed data
(e.g., individual, household, residence, unique
business, unique email address, etc.)
-
Attributes of customers and/or
prospects (e.g., interests, preferences or
affinities)
-
Demographic and lifestyle
data
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Segmentation data
-
Campaign history
-
Marketing touch
tracking
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Suppression and opt-out
data
In future issues, we will discuss more
specifically the importance of being able to
access all of your marketing data so you can
further enhance your data. A fully integrated
marketing database provides marketers with the
tool they need to gather additional information
on their customers and prospects. For example,
predictive models can be applied to identify top
prospects, derived data can be utilized and
records can be appended with additional
demographic and lifestyle data purchased from
outside vendors.
The bottom
line is to fully integrate your marketing
database to ensure direct marketers have the
tools they need to improve their marketing
messages and campaign lists—increasing campaign
response rates and ultimately sales and
ROI.
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