Having been specialized in the area of database marketing for a while, thought I would share with you some ideas about database marketing and how to build customer relationship for your jewelry business.
Whether you are selling or marketing through online and offlince channels, you have many opportunities to capture customers database, such as their profile, preference and behaviours. Such opportunities should not be wasted and you should develop a program to capture customers database.
Database marketing allowing you to maximize customer value through cross sell, up sell, retention and repeat sale. It could be a good source for getting referrals as well. Your database is the key to survival in bad times. And it’s the key to maximum profits in good times. Here’s what you need to know about database marketing.
A database is not just a collection of names. It’s a collection of individualized, consumer behavioral information, isolated to each customer. The database concept inputs data and generates information that allows for selective targeted marketing. It provides comprehensive, up-to-date and relevant information about prospects and/or clients, and will pay for itself quickly with visible, measurable sales.
Sources of your database
You will have the opportunity to capture customers information through various touch points such as those below:
- Email enquiries and order.
- Phone enquiries and orders
- Online Sales order through your websites, third party websites. You should create a 'Contact Us' form where you get your customers or prospects to fill in some preset questions.
- Offline channels such as people you meet at your stall, your friends, your colleagues etc. You should always try to exchange business cards with your prospects and encourage your prospects to drop their name cards or write down their details in your visitor log book.
Building Your DatabaseAs you start your database, the most elementary data collected is your customer profile and their buying history: what they bought, when, how much and the source of the order. Here is an example of a typical database structure. In the business of handmade jewelries or products, you could perhaps capture the following information:
Customer Profile:
Name
Age
Gender
Address
Phone
Purchaing History:
Date of order
Source of order
Product Purchased
Product Type
Material of Product
Beading Technique
Contact History
Campaigns targeted
Response Type
Date of Sales enquiries
Enquiry status
Customer Opt In (Yes/ No)
Opt In Date
Your goal is to ultimately develop a high-quality, long-standing relationship of repeat business. With proper analysis of the database, predictive models can be created to mail selectively and with the right frequency. With the proper customer insights, it will help you to customize your creations for your customers as well.The ultimate result is that you can provide your customers with what they really want, when they need it. Properly implemented, you can increase your response rate and lower your cost-per-order. The result is higher profits.
Permission Based Database Marketing
As best practice, you should always allow your customers to subscribe and unsubscribe your promotional marketing. This will help build trust between you and your customers. The worst thing to happen is your marketing materials are seen as spam by your customers.
Well, it does take a lot of time to maintain high quality database. But the value in return is worth the effort.
I wlll share with you best practices for database marketing in my next post.
