Think about all the details you know about the people closest to you, and you’ll realize you have a huge wealth of information at your command. Birthdays, favorite foods, hobbies, tastes in music and reading material – you can probably summon up all these details and more about family and friends. If you slip up and forget an important date, you’re likely to hear about it from the other party.
Your customers’ data is just as important to your organization on a professional level, yet customers won’t usually tell you when they feel left out or slighted. They just stop being customers. A fully functional and well-maintained prospect database lets you keep track of important information and put it into context so you can continue to treat your leads and customers the way they want to be treated, encouraging them to put their trust in you to solve their problems and anticipate their needs.
Getting to Know Your Leads Individually
Database services assemble account information in a central location so everyone in your organization who needs to know details about leads can find information at a glance. With data append, the knowledge you already have is supplemented with additional details from other sources, filling in blanks in your knowledge and allowing you to provide better, more personalized service. Once you know more about a particular lead’s industry, sales volume, geographical location, and other details, you’re able to provide more specific solutions. Because your marketing database is centralized, you can follow that account’s entire buying journey and add more detail to it throughout the lifetime of your contact with that lead.
Seeing the Bigger Picture
Relational databases do more than store information like an address book or pocket calendar. They also use the details they contain in sophisticated analytics that shed light on how data is interrelated. Correlations tell important stories to marketers about where their most lucrative market segments are, how to nurture leads most effectively, and which campaigns and techniques offer the greatest ROI. Analysis is an essential component of database marketing, the element that turns isolated phrases of individual lead data into a larger narrative that gives your marketing strategy direction and purpose.
Improving over Time
A marketing database gives you deeper insight not just now, but well into the future. With every message that hits your market segments’ sweet spot (and even with those that fly wide of the mark), you improve your ability to meet your customers’ needs as completely as possible. You also learn to recognize emerging markets so you can go out and meet them instead of waiting for them to find you. For example, you might see an uptick in visits from a new region. It’s worth investigating to find out what’s caused the sudden influx in traffic so you can approach your potential new customer base directly instead of waiting for word of mouth to spread.
Lifetime Customer Care
Making a sale is just the beginning of your relationship with your customer. Long-term customer service requires an accurate, complete history of every interaction you’ve had with your customer, from marketing messages to sales records to upgrades to customer service calls. A centralized marketing database is your ultimate asset for customer care, allowing you to trace the effects of every interaction and ensure the highest possible satisfaction.
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