2. INTRODUCTION
Database marketing is a form of direct marketing using databases of customers or potential
customers to generate personalized communications in order to promote a product or
service for marketing purposes. The method of communication can be any addressable
medium, as in direct marketing.
Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical techniques to develop models of
customer behaviour, which are then used to select customers for communications
The "database" is usually name, address, and transaction history details from internal sales
or delivery systems, or a bought-in compiled "list" from another organization, which has
captured that information from its customers. Typical sources of compiled lists are charity
donation forms, application forms for any free product or contest, product warranty cards,
subscription forms, and credit application forms.
There are two main types of marketing databases,
1) Consumer databases (B2C)
2) Business databases (B2B)
4. DATABASE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
Database Marketing and techniques tailored to fit your own products and services, you
can gather and store targeted information about your visitors, clients or prospects.
1. Appended Data - More in-depth data may be desired for business to business (B2B)
communications like SIC code, number of employees and annual sales, for bidding
projects. Or for one-on-one relationships with clients like for realtors and insurance
products, people can append data to name and address files, seeking out income,
age, home value, length of residence, number of children and over 30 other bits of
info. The resulting data is then used in all types of well targeted marketing
campaigns. Appended data can be done in-house or outsourced with larger
companies that have more complete databases.
5. DATABASE MARKETING TECHNIQUES - CONTD
2. Website Data – Some websites offer a means to gather their own data, too, through
the use of cookies that gather information from website visitors. This marketing
method is popular for allowing Internet marketers a means to learn more about
who visited their sites, which pages they searched and for how long, and many
other site statistics. These are then used for their product and service creation,
packaging and pricing.
3. Email Communications & Tracking – Email surveys, customer reply forms and
shipping documents that use tracking numbers and share them with the clients are
excellent examples of database marketers in action. By using this type of tracking,
companies can improve their customer-client relationships, resulting in increased
sales and customer retention, and earn more about their clients in the process for
future sales and retention efforts.
6. EVOLUTION OF DATABASE MARKETING
DRIVER #1: THE CHANGING ROLE OF DIRECT MARKETING
The move to relationship marketing for competitive advantage.
The decline in the effectiveness of traditional media.
The overcrowding and myopia of existing sales channels.
DRIVER #2: CHANGING COST STRUCTURES
The decline in electronic processing costs.
The increase in marketing costs.
DRIVER #3: CHANGING TECHNOLOGY
The advent of new methods of shopping and paying.
The development of economical methods for differentiating customer communication.
DRIVER #4: CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
The desire to measure the impact of marketing efforts.
7. WHY DATABASE MARKETING ???
If your work in a market niche with a limited number of prospects, e.g. 100-10000.
In this case, if you can compile a database of all your prospects, it may be more
economical to communicate with them directly, rather than via mass media.
If your business is repeat by nature: your product requires regular replacement, service or
replenishment, or you sell complementary products. When you have customer details
on the database, you can contact them at the right time with the right offer and gain
extra sales for a very low cost to your business.
Your sales cycle is three months or longer. Prospects will forget about you should you be
out of contact for 90 days or longer, so you need to remind them that you are there.
Database marketing is a targeted, cost-effective means of doing so.
8. CHALLENGES OF DATABASE
MARKETING
Tracking their online behaviour has become the most effective means for most
organizations to understand what is top-of-mind for their target audience RIGHT
NOW. Message and offer, finely tuned to audience, have been and remain the key
to effective database marketing
To build an effective online database marketing system, it’s necessary to use a robust
targeting platform that integrates online behavioural data with any essential
customer data
It’s a very rare database marketer that wants to target based on simple aggregations
like visits, page views or time on site. These just aren’t meaningful database
marketing aggregations
9. CHALLENGES OF DATABASE
MARKETING - CONTD
Web analytics systems evolved primarily as reporting and site analysis systems. As a
consequence, Web analytics systems don’t generally work at the correct fundamental
data level – the visitor
The volume of data can be enormous and mining the data would be a costly affair.
Targeting a Single Communication: Understanding what a visitor cares about most
Targeting against a basket of interests: Creating Fuzzy-Logic
Marketing organizations have learned and re-learned that working within the vendor SaaS
model is faster, cheaper and ultimately better than getting involved with big IT.
The addition of Score into Visitor Data Mart isn’t just the addition of a separate
methodology for doing selections. It’s a deep integration where scores become another
input available to Segments
10. CONCLUSION
The bottom-line is this – for almost every marketing organization in the online
world and for almost every task where serious SaaS plays exist, the out-
sourced SaaS model has become the norm which cannot be ignored
Database marketing with online data is still in its nascent stages. Despite huge
amounts of seemingly invaluable online customer behaviour and a growing
capability to integrate data across channels, few organizations have been
able to truly unleash this capability.