Smart Marketing, 101
Personalized or data-driven marketing to your customers, “smart marketing”, is something few, if any companies actually do. Most companies still just send the “blast-a-gram” to everybody with zero personalization or forethought. These types of marketing “messages” typically get thrown into the trash without the recipient (home owner, or other recipient) even glancing at the (wasted) mailing.
By following a few simple steps, you can improve your odds of getting a positive customer marketing response. And, at the same time, not waste time and money trying to sell your services to people who don’t want them or perhaps couldn’t even use them. There are no guarantees in marketing, of course, smart marketing or otherwise, but with some filtering, you can weed out the least likely to use your product or services.
Below is a simple example of how just using simple customer data and a database could save you lots of money — even on the first mailing. The amount of money saved on this first example could buy database software for several employees!
This example assumes you have a database (of some type), a label printer, and a way to print labels for a 5×7 mailer.
————
Let’s say you’ve been in business for 10 or 20 years and you have 1,000 customers. Now, some of these customers may have only used your service once, moved away, don’t use the particular service your marketing flier covers, or are the best customers ever. But, how do you know? You could go through each of the 1,000 customers one at a time by paper, but this exercise would take days if not weeks every time.
We need a better way: a real computer database of our customers — which is usually very easy to set up.
Now, using “traditional” (non-smart) marketing, if you had just ordered 2,000 5×7 color mailers, which for our example, cost $2.00 apiece after postage, you would spend $2,000 to send a mailer to each of the 1,000 customers in your database.
Is this “smart” marketing? Nope. Just because you used a cool computer to print out the 1,000 labels on a cool new label printer could mean you’re wasting money faster using technology. Instead, doing an even relatively shallow analysis on your customer data could narrow this list extensively (save your marketing dollars) and improve your odds of getting a response.
For this example, to narrow the list, let’s just assume we apply a “filter” to our database to our data so we only include “active customers” for the mailing who:
1. Have done business with us in the last three years.
2. Have done at least $500 business with us.
3. Actually use our product or service in the mailer.
Now, after applying this simple filter to our customer data, instead of all 1,000 customers, we now have 250 that meet the selection criteria, the “filter”, above.
So, using our simple filter, we’ve…
1. Saved $1,500 from the mailing cost (we already paid for the fliers, but we can still use the unsent ones later) and
2. We are sending fliers to “active customers” who have the product or service we’re promoting.
And, because this filter is part our our database, we can use it over and over. Note too that since part of the filter above is “date-based”, the rule/filter will potentially show you different customers on each filtered list over time. That’s cool since you don’t need to do additional work to show the current list each time you run the marketing report, label printing, or whatever.
Note that this example’s definition of what an “active customer” is a “business rule” and it’s never guaranteed to be correct. Each business would need to define and test out their own business rules and modify as necessary. Hurricane could help you define business rules for your business.
The idea with a business rule is to define rules which describe aspects of your business that you can use in the database software for decisions. For example, what does it mean to be an active customer? Or, another business rule might define “what is a problem vendor”?. Perhaps you track issues with delivery, quality control, or other metrics. This rule might be as easy as how many times you need to have issues with a vendor before you need to take corrective action.
In this example, we didn’t discuss if you had a customer’s email address and you used that instead of snail-mail in your marketing to save even more money. For example, your database software could “loop through” all the selected filtered customers. Then, if a customer record had an email address, and that customer was OK with marketing emails (you track that contact preference too), you email the marketing information to that customer instead of printing a label and snail-mailing an expensive flier. Or perhaps you do both: print a mailer and email. A nice flier in the mail, personalized in some way for a customer, might have a better impact than an email message. That’s another possible business rule — Always print a mailer and email if possible.
Finally, to further personalize your mailer, perhaps you use a larger label so you can include the name or brand of product the customer has.
—-
How do you get started with smart marketing? Some questions for thought below.
1. Do you use customer data?
2. How do you use it? Database? Excel?
3. Can you search it?
4. Do you support your customers using that information when they call you?
5. Can you take your database software “with you” to the customer site?
6. How do you enter new information and keep your database up to date?
7. Do you personalize your customer marketing?
8. Do you track marketing responses?
9. Do you track each date a customer event occurred?
10. Do you know what types of products you offer each customer uses?
11. Do you collect email addresses for customers and also track which customers are OK with email marketing contacts?
Many companies can’t answer at least some of these basic questions.
At Hurricane, we can help you set up a customer database, import existing data, and get you started with smart marketing. We can help you set up your own database in your office or in the cloud. We can also get your database system mobile and connected to your home office. You can start with a small system and grow that system as your needs grow.
Many companies will try to sell you you an expensive “CRM” system to market to your customers. However, for many small- to medium-sized businesses (< 250 employees), a CRM system could be much more than you need, is expansive, may require lots of other “supporting” software, and often, is difficult to learn and use.
We can start you on an inexpensive database platform and even teach you how to use it if you want to maintain it. If and when your needs grow beyond that initial database, we could transition your data to another database.
Let’s get started!
Please contact us today for more information!!!
——–
Please read our disclaimer available from our home page