Whatever your service or product is, you must get at the forefront of potential customers to close the deal. Many businesses have placed their trust in social media. While social media platforms are an excellent way to reach out to people, they have two significant drawbacks. You may have tens of thousands of followers on your preferred platform, for starters. However, due to algorithms that few (if any) humans understand, each post only reaches a small percentage of those followers.
Second, what happens if that platform is ever decommissioned? Don't expect to be given a neat list of contacts. If a platform ever goes down, your audience will vanish in an instant. Knowing this is, thankfully, half the battle. Now that you've realized you don't "own" your contacts from social media, it's time to consider how to protect your audience and take ownership of and responsibility for their contact information and data. Database marketing is what it's called, and you're about to learn the importance of database marketing in business and how to use it effectively.
What is Database Marketing?
Businesses used to collect names and addresses and send direct mail pieces like postcards, brochures, and flyers to potential and existing customers before the digital landscape became as vast today.
While traditional direct marketing still exists and can be beneficial to your business, digital options provide business owners with many opportunities for reaching their target audience. It enables you to determine how customers want to be marketed and then provide them with what they want.
Database marketing is the process by which businesses collect customer information such as
- Names
- Addresses
- Phone Numbers
- Purchase History
- Customer Support History
Once gathered, this data is used to create personalized experiences for each customer and store personal and purchasing information about them.
Benefits of Database Marketing
You can decide the importance of database marketing now that you understand it. Regardless of the size of your company, keeping your database up to date, constantly adding to it, and nurturing it is critical to your company's success. Among the various benefits of database marketing you'll notice are:
1. Take Control of Your Contacts
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Information is power, and when you give social media platforms complete control, you jeopardize your future. Social media is fantastic and should be a part of your marketing strategy, but it should not be the entire strategy.
2. Address Your Audience Members Directly
It's deafening out there! It's impossible to turn on the television, listen to the radio, or go online these days without being bombarded with marketing and sales messages touting the next best thing you must have. These messages are intended to cast a wide net and capture as many customers as possible. On the other hand, you have a keen sense of what is going on. You're aware that to be "heard" above the din, you'll need to tailor your message to your target audience. This is possible thanks to database marketing.
3. Create Buyer Personas or Avatars
Who is your most valuable client? What is their way of life? What is it that keeps them awake at night? What problem have you been able to solve for them? Where can you find more people who are similar to them? Using database marketing, you can identify your ideal customer and then target people who "look" like them on paper.
4. Separate Your Buyers into Groups
Create distinct "audiences" based on demographics, behaviors, and purchasing history. This allows you to better understand them and provide them with more of what they want and less of what will distract them.
5. Establish Loyalty Programs that Encourage Repeat Purchases
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Determine the best channel and time to contact your customers to maximize engagement.
6. Turn Up the Volume on Your Customer Service
Allow your employees to see all customers’ interactions with your brand. Database marketing could be the answer to your prayers. Of course, as with anything, you must do it correctly to see a good return on investment. To do so, we must consider developing a database marketing strategy.
Guide to Database Marketing Strategy
You have a lot of useless data if you don't have a strategy. Put your database to work for you by developing a solid strategy from the start. Here's how it works:
1. Choose Who You Want to Contact
Who do you want to do business with, and how do they appear on paper? Demographics such as age and gender, marital status, income level, and location can be included. It could also include psychographic information like their interests, activities, and opinions.
Create an ideal customer profile or persona and then use it to determine what information you need to collect for your database.
2. Make it a Collaborative Effort
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Despite having the word "marketing" in the title, database marketing can be influenced by multiple departments within your organization. Marketing, sales, and customer service or support all have contact with potential and current customers. Seek feedback from them to build a marketing database.
3. Make Use of the Appropriate Tools
There are numerous database marketing software options available to meet your requirements. Conduct some research, solicit recommendations, and select the best choice for your company. Once you've decided on a solution, give your employees the training they need to fully utilize it.
4. Collect Customer Information
Now that you've determined how you'll collect data, it's time to figure out what you'll need and get started. The possibilities are endless, but here are a few to consider:
- Demographic Information - includes gender, age, marital status, parental status, health, and financial information.
- Psychographic Data - Interests, actions, and opinions are examples of psychographic data. What do they hold dear? What kind of life do they lead?
- Acquisition Data - Which channel did they use to enter?
- Technographic and Activity Information - How do they relate to your brand? Is it done on a desktop or a mobile device? Android or iOS? Do they interact with your brand through your website, social media pages, or a mobile app?
- Transaction and Correspondence Data - How frequently and what do they buy from you? Have they asked for help in any way other than a sales situation?
5. Maintain the Cleanliness and Security of Your Data
As previously stated, it is very easy for data to become obsolete and useless in database marketing. It should be reviewed regularly and backed up so that your entire customer history is not lost if something happens to your database.
6. Avoid Being Creepy
On the internet, you can learn a lot about people. You are not obligated to do something simply because you can. Respect your customers' privacy and don't collect or disseminate information about them that won't help you earn the customer and serve them better.
How Will You Put the Information You've Gathered to Use?
After you've taken the time to collect customer data, it's time to put the puzzle together and leverage your gleaming customer database.
Here are some strategies you can use to maximize the potential of your database:
∙ Divide Your Audience into Segments
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This is the first and most important step in database marketing, particularly a B2B marketer. It is critical to always group your audiences based on similar characteristics, such as geography or shopping patterns, to send targeted campaigns that will ultimately send your conversion rates to skyrocket. The more segments you create, the more targeted your messaging will be, and the higher your overall response rate.
∙ Remind Your Clients and Subscribers to Participate
Self-improvement and learning companies like Duolingo and Headspace use this strategy frequently, but the basic concept can be applied to many industries. You can use reminders to reach out to inactive customers and entice them to re-engage with your brand. If you're ad-based, this means you want more people to see your products. People are more likely to renew subscriptions if they interact with your brand regularly. Your customer database contains the key to determining when appropriate to target each segment of your customer base.
∙ Showcase Your Company's New Product Announcements
If you create a new product or service, you should always begin by promoting it to existing clients or customers familiar with your brand and are more likely to implement it first. How can you gain their approval and maintain that loyal relationship if you don't do database marketing? Similarly, suppose you create a new offering, think it's fantastic, and then bring it to market. Your current customers are an excellent source of information about the potential success of a new or updated offering. If your customers aren't interested in what you have to offer, you can solicit feedback and go back to the drawing board to make the necessary changes.
∙ Create Specific Social Media Campaigns
In this day and age, social media insights are extremely valuable. Users constantly interact with various brands via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter platforms. These platforms enable you to see what resonates with your target audience in a new and evolving way.
You can use your data to target platforms like LinkedIn, allowing you to create paid ads targeted to specific email addresses.
∙ Organize Focus Groups and Surveys
You'll need market feedback at some point during your marketing operations process. What better place to look for this than your database? Using various curated surveys and focus groups, you can better understand what your customers are looking for in the specific product or service you provide. This information can then improve your offering(s) and optimize your marketing strategy.
Determine any potential problems in your process. This is not limited to your products or services; it can also apply to internal issues. A customer database is beneficial when identifying issues such as fraud or poor user experience.
Introducing Strikingly
Database marketing is one of the most critical steps in the sales and business process. The ultimate goal is to build a marketing database of potential customers and then interact and communicate with them, hoping that they will convert from a potential customer (or prospect) to a current and possibly loyal customer.
Now that we've learned what is database marketing, it's time for you to get started on creating a beautiful website. Using Strikingly’s advanced website builder, you can create a website that will appeal to suspects, prospects, and customers alike. With our hundreds of templates at your disposal, you'll be up and running in no time. More information on our pricing can be found here, but don't worry, we also offer free services that will get your business off to a good start!
Conclusion
That's all there is to it. If database marketing isn't already a part of your overall marketing strategy, it's time to start. If you are, keep in mind that it takes time to build a marketing database. When it comes to improving your marketing efforts, you won't have anything to go on unless you have high-quality data. Finally, remember that maintaining and optimizing your database is just as important as growing it, so be patient, and success will follow.
