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Database marketing increases brand loyalty and sales

A recent Pitney Bowes direct mail survey, in conjunction with Peppers and Rodgers Group, confirms direct mail’s value as the most effective marketing vehicle for companies to establish customer relationships.

Direct mail accounts for 50% of marketing dollars spent yearly in the USA. In the survey, 345 of respondents said direct mail contributes most to establishing a relationship with their customers, compared with print 30%, TV 25%, radio 5%, e-mail 4%, Internet 2% and telemarketing 0%.

U.S. Postal Service data confirms this by saying that 50% of direct mail recipients read the message immediately and 40% of those think it provides useful information. And more importantly, 22% of respondents said they would buy the product described by a direct mail piece.

The Devil is in the Data so says DMNews.com
For companies trying to convert marketing investment into revenue, high data quality is the most crucial component for direct mail success. Those who disregard data quality and fail to update their customer and prospect databases risk wasting company resources and missing revenue-generation opportunities.

DMNews.com gives us some key reasons to invest our money and resources to develop a quality database.

• Generate sales. The goal is to sell your product or service. High quality data, over time, increases sales.
• Build awareness. Higher quality data lets you reach more customers or prospects and build corporate brand awareness.
• Track customer behaviour. A well-maintained database can track customers’ buying behaviour and give insight on what to market to a particular audience and when to market it.
• Upsell and cross-sell. Buying behaviour is used to upsell and cross-sell a customer on a more advanced product or across a range of products. A customer database can be used to send notices of new versions and new features.

A precisely defined target audience is key to a direct mail campaign, but using your database to generate sales, build awareness and track customer behaviour requires gathering as much information on your target market as possible.

Basic information is essential. But getting as much detail as possible raises the marketing value of a database and, therefore, improves your direct mail campaign’s potential for success. The challenge lies in finding the customer and prospect details that turn a database into a generator of qualified sales leads. The type of information to include in your database depends on the product or service being marketed and the more comprehensive and relevant the information, the better the database.

A targeted, quality database is one of the best marketing assets a company has.
It should be reviewed periodically to find trends, used frequently to communicate with customers and updated regularly with customer feedback. A detailed, targeted database will make a direct mail campaign more successful.

Building, enhancing and maintaining a marketing database should form part of your overall integrated communications strategy. To build a marketing database allows us, as marketers, the opportunity to treat our good customers with the same common sense approach as that of the olden-day local shopkeeper.

In 1645, a great Japanese samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, wrote a basic truth, "In matters of strategy, it is not good to be led about by the enemy. Rather it is better to lead the enemy about." Build a marketing database and develop high quality creative programs and you are guaranteed to be in the enviable position as a leader in strategy.

Building Castles
Very few industries and very few companies have really learned the powerful uses of sophisticated databased marketing. Far too few marketing executives dedicate sufficient resources to this concept in marketing. A database? Is it your creative servant… or your creative master?

I am reminded of a beautiful quote that goes: “There is nothing wrong with dreaming, there is nothing wrong with building a castle in the sky as long as you build a solid foundation underneath.”

I believe that you as a company should build a database that serves as your foundation. By communicating with your best customers frequently, by tracking their purchases and motivating them to purchase even more, you are building your castle.


Source: Winnifred Knight