In today’s world, it’s more important than ever to intelligently cut costs. Too many times, cutting costs leads to harming revenue, service, or performance. However, your marketing database provides an ideal framework to cut costs while simultaneously maintaining, and in some cases even improving, direct marketing performance.

Use your Marketing Database to:

Effectively Suppress Existing Customers from Prospect Campaigns. Suppress prospects already in your marketing database during list creation. Remove external prospects by running a merge/purge of customers in your marketing database against your prospect lists.

Carefully manage the quantity of times you contact or “touch” your customers or prospects. Do not over-market to your best segments! This causes individuals to become fatigued and increases overall marketing costs. Your marketing database enables you to reduce the quantity of marketing touches and apply deliberate contact strategies to lower costs, increase response, and decrease frustration.

Run ROI analysis on each and every campaign. Only by measuring and then adjusting subsequent campaigns can you best capitalize on the power of your marketing database, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Execute multi-channel campaigns. For instance, you might send a direct mail wave followed by a second direct mail wave a few weeks later, typically an expensive proposition. Instead, use your marketing database to send an email follow-up to individuals in the first direct mail wave, thereby reducing your costs. Get even more refined by updating the email results back into your marketing database and send a second email follow-up only to individuals who opened and acted on your first email.

These 4 simple examples only scratch the surface to the number of ways you can use your marketing database to cut costs. Spend some time thinking and planning and you will undoubtedly come up with some great ideas of your own!

In addition, direct marketers frequently talk about getting the right message to the right person at the right time using the appropriate channel. The fact is, very few marketers are really living up to this ideal. But it is possible. Your marketing database provides the ideal framework to make this vision a reality, using one, or a blend, of several different approaches.

Precise Selections

Use your marketing database to precisely select your campaign recipients. Choose from a wide range of selects, including selects based on various RFM parameters, purchasing trends, demographic & lifestyle selects, or predictive model segments. Your marketing database provides you the framework to execute each of these or combinations of these to properly refine your selects.

Segment Testing

You probably have ideas about different offers, creative, or content. You can use your marketing database to build segments for each of these, with corresponding control groups, to try out and test your ideas. Your marketing database provides the framework to ponder, test, execute, measure, and improve.

Preference Capture

Often, marketers capture information from customers on communication channel preferences or product offer preferences, only to find there is no easy way to manage this information and act on it. Use your marketing database to capture, maintain, and act on this valuable information. Your customers are telling you what they want, how they want it, and when they want it. Use your marketing database to personalize and meet their needs.

Automated List Outputs

Perhaps you have a true and tried list pull that you want to use repeatedly. The applications for this type of list output are virtually unlimited. Maybe you want to send your customers a birthday email, a text message to brand new customers, or an automatic upsell offer for customers purchasing a specific product or series of products. Whatever the case, use your marketing database to automatically, easily, and efficiently output these lists in an ideally timed manner.

Author Bio: Jeff Barela Jeff is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer for Dovetail. Jeff has been in the database marketing industry for over 9 years and the database industry for over 15 years. He has helped Dovetail grow its marketing database solutions to span all of North America. Dovetail-The Marketing Database Company Jeff Barela jeff@dovetaildatabase.com 303.904.4771 www.dovetaildatabase.com

Category: Marketing
Keywords: marketing database,data integration,database marketing,direct marketing,direct marketing data