Business Ideas
blackline
August 1-15, 1996
Marketing to Your Market

Database strategies to manage a wealth of information

Index
Database Marketing Made Easy
A standardized approach
What are we doing right?
Digging for Gold
Knowing your customers
Beyond Targeted Marketing
Going with what works
Building Relationships
Harness the power of the information you already have in your business and you can improve your marketing efforts, streamline internal operations and deliver better service to your customers. Move your customer’s names and addresses out of your Rolodex and into a database, and suddenly you have access to a wide variety of direct marketing tools. By tracking your customers business needs in a simple, standardized way, your business can be more profitable. In short, a database can provide you with fast, easy and accurate answers to questions that are vital to the success of your business.

Database Marketing Made Easy
Database marketing is one of the hottest and most effective ways to turn your information into gold. Database marketing is simply collecting information about your prospects and customers, storing that information in a database and then using that information to do highly targeted, cost-effective marketing. Your business already collects the type of information that you need to fuel your database marketing efforts. Microsoft has the tools you need to store that information in a centralized database and then transform it into high-impact direct marketing promotions.

A standardized approach
If you are fortunate enough to have a photographic memory, you may be able to recall every detail of every interaction with your customers. But even if you do - your fellow employees may not. Why risk losing vital information about your customers by having it collected in a hodgepodge fashion? Rather than having everyone in your company keep their own customer contact information in spreadsheets, Rolodexes and post-it notes, create a standard database template that everyone in your organization uses without hassles. There are a wide variety of ready-made templates that come with Microsoft Access, a relational database, and with the Small Business Pack for Microsoft Office to help with business transactions, sales transactions, inventory control, and contact management. A standardized approach to collecting and storing customer information ensures that your business makes the most of this precious resource. Information can’t do much for your business if it is in someone else’s head or on a post-it note in the trash.

What are we doing right?
Personal computers with databases are remarkably powerful recording devises. The power lies in letting the computer and the database do the work of storing and analyzing the data - which helps you to make more informed decisions, pinpoint trends and identify opportunities. Microsoft Access is designed to help you answer questions like: What was my best selling product this year and which products should I drop? Is there a specific group of customers in my database that would respond best to this offer?

Instead of relying on gut feel alone to guide your decisions - a database helps you back your intuition with facts. As a seasoned business person, your gut feel is probably right on and a database may simply confirm what you knew all along. But when your business is at a crossroads, your database can deliver the kind of information you need to make difficult decisions. An analysis of your database can help illuminate problem areas and turn them into opportunities. As a part of the Microsoft Office family, Microsoft Access is completely integrated with all of the other Office products. This means that you can easily take data from your Access database and conduct a wide variety of standard business analyses using the ready-made templates in Microsoft Excel and the Small Business Pack.

Digging for Gold
Developing a prospect database is a great way to generate sales. Name capturing strategies range from exchanging business cards at a Chamber of Commerce meeting - to capturing names from your Web page on the Internet. Chinook Wines, a winery in Prosser Washington, has everyone that visits their wine tasting room sign a guest book. The entries into the guest book are then carefully entered into a customer database in Access to be used for promotional marketing.

Your company can easily create a Web page on the World Wide Web as a name capturing devise. Your company Web page can describe your company, products and services and offer to provide additional information to people who leave their names and addresses. Visitors who sign your Web page "guest book" will help fuel your direct marketing efforts and ultimately generate sales.

Knowing your customers
One of the most important requirements for successful database marketing is knowing your customers. To do this you need to cultivate customer profiles. Every interaction that your company has with a customer or prospect is a potential source of information for your customer profile.

The contact management template that comes with Microsoft Access can help your company maintain information on your customers and your prospective customers. You can customize this template based on your needs. Contact management databases help everyone in your company "know" your customers, even if they haven’t dealt with them directly. By knowing your customers, you can better serve them. Improving your service improves customer satisfaction - which improves your bottom line.

Beyond Targeted Marketing
Rather than sending the same direct mail piece to all of your customers, you can use your database to identify exactly what to send to whom. With Microsoft Office for Windows 95, you can send a personalized letter to your best prospects instead of "junk mail". For example, a bookstore could easily select from a customer database in Microsoft Access a set of all of the people who have bought at least $20 worth of romance novels within the last month. The names and addresses from the Access database can then be merged into a personalized, promotional letter. Add a company newsletter created in Microsoft Publisher and the piece is complete. If you’ve got a fax modem attached to your PC you can even fax your direct marketing piece and save the postage.

Going with what works
Another important aspect of database marketing is the continual analysis of your marketing efforts to identify the most successful and cost-effective promotions. By recording the promotions or offers that your customers respond to, you can continually refine your approach. You can easily move your customer data from Microsoft Access into a ready-made template in Microsoft Excel and generate response rates as well as break-even analysis. Microsoft technology helps you identify where your marketing dollars are best spent.

Building Relationships
Relationship marketing is using the information you have collected on your customers to anticipate and exceed their expectations. By studying the buying patterns of your customers, you can direct them to your offerings that will best meet their needs. This type of personalized, soft touch marketing is instrumental in developing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Kol Shaver is the owner of Zephyr Books in Woodland Washington. Zephyr Books carries a wide variety of used and rare books and Kol offers classes on collecting rare books. "I don’t know what I would do without my customer database!", says Kol. "Every time a customer comes in and makes a purchase, I take a few seconds to indicate the type of books that the customer likes. Then, the next time they come in, I can say ‘Hey Mrs. Johnson, did you see that we have a bunch of new romance novels in?’ It’s great—my customers are happy because I know what they like - and I’m happy because I sell more books. I also use my database to send my customers fliers on specials we have in the store as well as classes we offer, poetry readings and the like. My database is an essential part of my business."

Database marketing is well within your reach. Your database is virtual gold when used to communicate your products and services to your customers. By keeping your customers informed as to your product offerings and specials, you stay in the front of their minds. Microsoft has the tools to help you with database marketing.