In marketing, the most important thing to get right is your database. Acquiring the correct contacts and ensuring you are collecting relevant information on these contacts, is the cornerstone to successful marketing. WIthout having the right people to speak to, or the right information on those people, all your hard work will fall on deaf ears. For this reason it is critical to spend a good amount of time identifying your dataset (the information you want to collect on your contacts). The best way to do this is to think about how you would like to be communicating to people in two (2) year’s time. Some common questions to ask yourself are:
- Do you want to address contacts by name?
- Do you want to offer contacts’ something for their birthday?
- Do you want to market to locals?
- Do you want to reward your most loyal customers?
- Do you want to re-engage customers who have stopped spending with you?
- Do you want to reach out to customers about offers and promotions based on their spending history?
- Do you want to speak to contacts based on their age?
- Do you want to speak to contacts based on their gender?
Taking a step back and looking at how you would ideally like to target your marketing will clearly tell you what information is needed. Let’s say for example one of your goals is to boost trade midweek. A good way to do this is to focus your attention on the people who are in close proximity to your business. In order to target local customers you will need to find out where contacts live. Collecting contacts’ postcode will allow you gather the right information which you can then leverage for your midweek locals focused marketing.
The other key factor to a healthy database is growth. Making sure that the database is constantly and consistently growing is crucial. A prosperous business should have a flourishing database with active and well engaged contacts. Marketing success is dependant on thriving lists. So ensuring that there are numerous methods of data capture is vital. Generally speaking data capture should be happening through the following:
Company Website
Social Media
Loyalty/ Membership Program or App
On premise
If you have implemented data capture for the above then you should be seeing healthy database growth. Additionally, it is recommended that quarterly competitions are run to help stimulate additional growth.
Database maintenance is another fundamental to ensure your lists continue to thrive. Maintenance can be tackled a number of ways, but we recommend a two fold approach. The first is through automation. The aim with automation is to have the system quietly and constantly updating people’s information. The trigger for the automation would be based on the date that the contact was added to your database. When the trigger is met, the system sends out an email to the contact asking them to review their info and update accordingly. This type of automation works best if an offer is included.
The second approach to database maintenance would be a campaign which is run once every 12 months. This campaign would be a series of emails and SMS messages that request the existing contacts to review and update their information. This type of campaign is referred to as an update details campaign. When running an update details campaign you can take one of three angles:
First Date or Interview: This technique advises that you may not know the contact as well as you would like, and asks them to tell you a bit more about themselves.
Lucky Dip Competition: This approach masks the campaign as a competition. It asks the contacts to enter their details to go into the draw to win something.
Enter and Win: This method automatically gives the contact something in exchange for updating their information.
Out of the three techniques for running Update Details Campaigns, it is recommended that you go with option 2 or option 3. Both of these methods are proven to be more successful because they provide incentive for your contacts, which improves response rate by nearly 40%.