There is more business and more referrals waiting for you from the people who are your customers. You can reach them and bring them back through advertising in the media. Or you can maintain a database and bring them back personally.
Maintaining your database is an ongoing effort and should be seen as an evolutionary process. Is the information you collect now all you require, or do you believe that you can tweak and add? Let me give you six strategies to compare with what you are doing, to help you better profit from your marketing database.
NEVER LET A VIABLE PROSPECT GO
You spent time and money through networking, good customer service, advertising and website development to get prospective customers to your figurative door. Don't waste that money and time; establish a communication stream to keep in contact until they are ready to do business or refer.
EXCEL IS MAGIC
It doesn't matter what database software you use to store your information because it's simple to bring it into Excel to then manipulate, clean, and add to in seconds flat. Here are a few tricks:
1) Outlook contacts to Excel
Copy and paste: change the view to one that has your contacts showing by rows instead of as mini business cards. Then simply highlight all (Control + A), and paste into an empty Excel spreadsheet (Control + V).
Export: You can export your contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express/Windows Mail to Excel as well as vice versa. On the Contact file menu select Import and Export.
2) Access to Excel
Access will copy a file into Excel with a push of a button. In version 2007, on the ribbon it is External Data > Excel > Export. With earlier versions it is through the Tool Menu > Office Links > Analyse it with Excel.
3) Other files - CSV, TAB
To bring in the data from any other file, simply save it as a CSV or a text file and open it with Excel.
TARGETING IMPROVES SUCCESS
I promise you, less is more. Send offers to a correctly targeted subsection of your database rather than to the whole list. You might sacrifice a few potential sales, but you'll benefit by the fact you improve the longevity of your database.
The individuals on your database will only accept so much being marketed to. Overkill means they unsubscribe - literally or emotionally - by deleting or throwing out communications.
Furthermore, people are wary of signing up because of email overload and past experience with irrelevant communications.
Targeting is important if you want to maintain a relationship with that customer and prospect. You sort your list and select those you want to mail, email or SMS.
PLAN FOR THE FUTURE TODAY
If targeting improves success, do you have enough information to do so? Have you thought about what new products, services and customer service initiatives you'd like to introduce in the next few years? A new branch or store?
What about additional staff? Will you need to know or monitor a contact's productivity or contribution to business? If so, how will you measure it? What fields would you need? And are you consistently collecting mobile phone numbers so you can do SMS messaging in the future?
CATEGORIES, NOT COLUMNS
The last thing you want to do is work with an endless line-up of columns. If you don't plan well from the beginning, you could end up with too many to manage. The solution is to think instead in categories.
The Wrong Way: you set up separate columns for clients, prospects, old clients, suppliers. Then you would enter the person's name in the correct column, with a "yes/no" or "true/false" in all the others.
The Right Way: you set up one column called "client type" and have different categories (or variables) that you enter into that column: client, old client, prospect, supplier. In other words, wherever you can create a group, or eliminate the: "yes/no", "true/false" with a category - do it.
Worried that someone will require two or more variables? Separate them with a comma and you'll still be able to filter for those specific individuals.
TREAT REFERRALS WELL
Do you have a distinct communication, thank you and reward plan for colleagues who refer business your way? Why not?
A suggestion to help them could be a newsletter about how to improve their business success. Why not create a recurring reminder to prompt you every few months to telephone for a chat?
The more thought you put into developing and using your database, the more you'll be rewarded.
Debbie Mayo-Smith is a best-selling author and international speaker. website for Motivational Speaker Author Debbie Mayo-Smith
