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Who exactly is your customer? What do they look like? What age are they? Where do they come from? What are their characteristics & lifestyles? These are a few questions which normally pop up especially with small micro businesses. But these all are fairly easy questions to answer, if you have a database! Let’s learn more about it.
The Importance of a Database
When someone about your product or services, over any social media channel or a website, you tend to respond promptly over the same. You’re correct to respond to your customers using the channel they use, but what more do you know about the customer from these channels? If they phone you then ask for their email address, if they email you ask for their Facebook profiles. If you want to know who your customers are, then you must collect as much relevant details as possible so you can begin to understand exactly who your target market is. In today’s fast paced world, we tend to avoid calling people unless we really want their service immediately! If given a chance to buzz over a Facebook page, a website or email address then we make an inquiry in our own free time. Don’t we?
Database Benefits
The importance of capturing as much information as possible about your customers is essential to ensure future marketing activities are more relevant to the people who’re receiving them. With a richly populated database you will be able to understand:
- How much it’s cost you to generate a lead (Cost Per Lead)
- Cost Per Sale
- Conversion Ratios – Enquiries to Sales
- Customer trends & habits
- Your typical customer location
- Your typical customer demographics
- The typical lifestyles your customers share
Measurement & Segmentation
Measuring the effectiveness & ROI of your marketing efforts cannot be achieved unless you capture, store and utilize the information from your database. There’s no point in having details about your customers in a range of locations like a diary, email list, pieces of paper and social media accounts. Your customer details must be in one place so they’re easily accessible for speed and accuracy with the ability to collate and measure that data. From here you can target smaller segments of customers based on a range of variables and tailor marketing communications to those smaller more unique groups of people.
Don’t underestimate the importance and power of the database to your business, because from here you will truly be able to understand exactly who your customers are and how to reach them.
Accurate Customer Information
Let’s say you have been capturing data of your customers (which is really good!), but how much of that data is genuine? There are 75-85% chances where a customer may not be comfortable to share their personal contacts & hence, may give you random or junk data while billing!
Given such a situation, it is advisable to check your data regularly. Append missing contacts or emails, which could help you reach your customers!