How to Enhance Your Customer Database

How to Enhance Your Customer Database

Your customer database is a valuable asset. Learn what you can do to buy data to enhance what you have to make it more valubable by giving you more information about your prospects and customers.

We're starting the conversation. Give advice about enhancing your customer database. And read what other people say by using the tabs on this page. The MarketingZone Editors will use this input to continuously update and improve this article.

From our experience: Most companies spend far too much money on mass marketing. Why? It's often the easiest and fastest way (people think) to generate sales. What is less expensive and more effective in generating sales is what the marketing industry calls CRM (customer relationship marketing). That is, knowing who your customers and prospects are, how to contact them, what they've purchased and information about them (demographic information like their age, sex, whether they are married, etc.) and using this information to send them the most relevant messages and offers.

What you can do to enhance your customer data to make it more valuable

Know this: Your customer database or mailing list may be called a "house list" or "house file" by list sellers and companies in the direct mail industry.

1. Purchase data, called appends, about your customers

Want to know more about your existing customers without asking them? To more tightly target offers and mailings to increase your response rates and ROI, you can purchase more data about the people on your customer list such as:

Data appends (additional fields of information) such as household income and home value to consumer information and sales volume and employee size to business information.
e-mail append - this allows you to contact your customers via email in addition to traditional mail
telephone number append

Who can help you with this? Top Direct Mail List Suppliers

2. Hire an expert in data analytics

These experts, generally freelancers or small specialty firms, will identify people in your database who own specific products; find the demographic and psychographic makeup of your customers and prospects; and build a regression analysis so that you can market to the appropriate people during a particular life event. This all helps you with segmenting your customer and prospect list to better target customers with different, and more relevant, messages and offers thus increasing your response rate and improving the ROI of your mailing.

Who can help you with this?

Database analysts. Find them here by searching for specialists with this expertise on MarketingZone Find Experts to Hire
Best Sources for Marketing Freelancers

3. Add people to your database

Your current and past customers are the foundation of your direct mail list and customer database. You want everyone in your company helping to collect customer contact information and keep it up-to-date. Be sure to collect email addresses as well as mailing addresses.

What do you have to say? Share your comments below or give advice about how to enhance your customer database.

This information is protected by copyright and for the individual use of MarketingZone Premium Members only. You have agreed to our terms of use. Please do not post, share or distribute this information without our permission.

Please tell your friends and colleagues about MarketingZone

Share |

Comment on This Article

Find Marketing Experts To Hire

Researching marketing products or services to buy?

Top Marketing Suppliers
- Reviews are written and continuously updated by editors.
- We don't accept advertising and we don't participate in affiliate deals so our subscribers can rely on us for credible, honest reviews.

Costs for Marketing

TIP: Let us do the work to research suppliers and costs. Premium Member Benefits

No part of this work, including design, content, and underlying technology on all pages, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, screen capture, and recording or by an information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations referenced with full attribution. Pages may be printed for the sole use of the person printing them. MarketingZone content is available via content license. Address inquiries to licensing@marketingzone.com.

MarketingZone™ is a trademark of MarketingZone, Inc.