MarketingMeasure » Blog Archive » Database Marketing For SMB (Dallas, TX)

Database Marketing For SMB (Dallas, TX)

Dallas, TX 6 November 2008 By Phillip Crum Please Re-Tweet Freely

A solid foundation of data is necessary for success.

Last post I told you how simple it could be to set up a hosted database accessible anytime, from anywhere. Even offered you a way to manage that data so you could get back to what you should be doing; selling something! Now let’s add another step that’ll do two things:

Reduce your workload even further.
Make your company more money for the dollars you’re already spending.

Still with me? We’re gonna link another program to the hosted database. This will allow the two programs to “talk” to each other without any help from you (see #1 above). When a new contact record is input into the db the marketing program can “see” it and use it in a campaign. No double input. When a new contact, not currently in the db, responds to a campaign, they will input their data into an online form to obtain whatever your campaign offered. That contact info is then passed along to the connected db automatically so you don’t have to input that data (see #1 above). Slick, huh? Okay, we’ve given you back some time using simple technology we’ll set up for you, what to do with all that spare time? Why don’t we look at accomplishing #2 above?

Our online marketing program can be utilized in much the same way as the db program. You can do it or we’ll do it for you. You can design an email to go out to a list you segmented from the db. You can incoporate variable data fields in the email and pull information from the database so each email is a 1-off letter to the recipient. Simple enough, let’s keep going.

We might suggest that you build a landing page for your campaign. That can be done within our marketing program and again, you can do it or we’ll do it for you. Your target will click on a personalized url (a “purl”) in the email and be taken to a personalized website page—a landing page—where your offer is explored a bit further. Promises are made, incentives are offered, angels sing, and snow falls lightly in places you can’t pronounce. Additional requested data is input by the visitor (see #1 above) and ends up in your db immediately. By virtue of the personalized url and the additional intrigue and information offered by the landing page via your carefully crafted offer, your response rate is going to improve (see #2 above).

I forgot to mention earlier that because you can segment your contact information quite easily, your campaigns will be more highly focused and bear more fruit (again, #2 above). You want an example. Alright. let’s say you sell petfood and you’ve been mailing 1000 offers for free samples of a new catfood line you’re now offering. So you mail to everyone in your list that owns a pet and get a 3% response rate. That’s 30 requests for free catfood. The direct marketing program we utilized cost $1 per contact so we just spent $1000 bucks.

If we had gone just one more level in our quest to segment the perfect list we might have looked to build a list of just cat owners. Let’s do that and so we discover there’s only 500 cat owners in our db. Now we’re in a position to mail a free catfood offer to only cat owners. See where this is going? Well let’s do the math!

Our response rate jumped to 6% which yielded 30 requests for catfood again. Except this time we only spent $500 dollars on the direct marketing campaign. In this case we’re giving away free samples so there’s no money being transferred but you can see how your ROI would absolutely jump simply because you spent less. Fact is, because the list is targeted you’re going to realize a higher natural response rate so you get the benefit of more actual responses and less program cost. This simply puts more money in your pocket (see #2). I rest my case.

Next time we’ll talk about adding direct mail to this mix and see what happens.

Click a couple, will ya!