Database Marketing

In a few of my past articles, I have mentioned the words "Database Marketing". Database Marketing in it's simplest term is the implementation of techniques where
you use all the information available within your company records as well as any external information you can gather to either improve your Marketing efforts.
Based on information acquired you can create "Target Groups" for products and services to create contact lists, or most commonly known and used as mailing lists. This is a specific group of people, defined by a certain demography, interest or characteristic.

By using a wide-scoped survey form, you can build, maintain, use and reuse a database of prospective customers. The first time I found myself building a survey form, I scanned other survey forms to see what questions they were asking. I wrote each one down, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. After going through approximately 50 very different surveys, I filtered them down until I had a good working model.

An efficient database system makes it easy to search and extract names and addresses of prospects that have answers aligned with the probable market for your
product or service. If you haven't started your database marketing plan yet, stop by
http://www.GreatDesignz.com or write us webmaster@greatdesignz.com. We'll be happy to assist you in building a Marketing Database as well as survey forms to help build them. You will find that the cost of having one designed will be far exceeded by the results and sales you get back in return.

The four basic steps in database marketing are:

1) Gathering & Analyzing your present data.
2) Targeting your consumer group based on this
analysis.
3) Implementing the contact of your target group
via direct marketing.
4) Cleanup and Control of the results.


Building a marketing database requires at least one (if not both) of these factors: Cost & Time. You will quite often need to coax your contacts into providing you
with the necessary data by offering something in return for their trouble. If not, it could take you quite some time to gather enough information to be dependable.

If the circumstances do not permit the luxury of building your initial database, or the thought simply does not appeal to you, there are many places on the Internet where you can buy or rent lists. Many of the more successful firms will already have a database and cross-referencing system in place. They can supply you with highly targeted mailing lists. For someone who is new in business and has no customer base at all, they may find these mailing lists very helpful not only in sales, but in the building of their own database.

Depending on your product or service demographics can also play a leading role in your database marketing program. There are many sources of demographics on the
Internet and all types of ways to narrow them down. You can start at http://www.demographics.com.

Another great source of demographics (for the US) is of course the US Government Census Bureau http://www.census.gov (See they are good for something besides taxes). However finding demographics information on the Internet is hardly restricted to the government. Check out the "Documents Center" hosted by
the University of Michigan
http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/. The have so much useful demographics that you could literally spend a week just researching this one site.

Building your marketing database for your enterprise merely takes initiative. The information is there, you just have to look for it.

Time for a story:

Recently I was at my favorite Barnes & Nobles picking up a book. I was talking to the young lady while checking out and she mentioned that she also was selling on the Internet. I asked what her product was and she told me a "Pen". It seems that the girl scouts are really into this pen, so they got a hold of all the email addresses for the council members and announced that they could offer them this pen at a reduced rate
and would the council members please pass this on to the Scoutmasters. She said that they sold over 5,000 pens in a matter of a couple of months. So how hard was it to find the scoutmasters? I went to my favorite search engine and searched for "girls scouts", clicked on the very first link, and found myself on the Girls Scouts of America Web Site. Clicked on another link for "Councils". Lo and behold there is an email address for virtually every Girl Scout Council in the country. It would be nothing more than some copy paste time and I have my mailing list.

So, with this example, knowing nothing more than your target audience, a little looking and extraction work to start building your database. Try your hand at it.
Be creative in your thought and how you will go about looking for this "Target Group".

In Closing:

The moral of this story is that to successfully and efficiently market you products or service you must begin to maintain a history of survey data for prior customers and integrate this with fresh data from non-customer sources. Begin implementing selected target groups and maintain control on which selected groups are buying. Then do it all over again and again and again!

http://www.MakingProfit.co GreatDesignz.com

database@greatdesignz.com
http://www.GreatDesignz.com