Want a business that stands the test of time? If so, you need to maintain a marketing database.Without it, your business simply isn’t going anywhere – period!

If you don’t have a clue what customers are buying, when they’re buying it, or how much each customer’s ultimately worth to your business; you’re missing a huge part of the marketing pie.

What a Marketing Database does for Your Company

1. CLTV

Calculating each Customer’s Lifetime Value to your company. You can’t price products and services to maximize profits and reduce costs without this information.

2. RFM

Understanding each customer’s Recency and Frequency, and overall Monetary value to the company. When was the last time they bought? How often do they buy? How much are they worth to you at the end of the month, year, five years from now?

3. Customer Relations

Ability to assess how effectively your customer service and sale’s reps are communicating with customers. Bad or non-existent service won’t help your marketing efforts; nor will just “okay” service.

4. Overall Customer Analysis

Seeing how best you’re interacting with them, how and when they’re interacting with you, and developing a game plan to make the entire process better. A well designed analysis software needs to be integrated with your customer databases for this to be cost and time effective.

5. Improve Customer Loyalty Programs

Rewarding your best and/or most long-term customers is right up there when it comes to marketing your business most effectively. Having a database of who you’re selling to can allow you to custom tailor your rewards programs to increase customer satisfaction by “giving more stuff away” without over-doing it ($$$), or leaving those most loyal out of the programs you offer.

In short, database marketing allows you to collect, store, synthesize, and analyze each and every tidbit of information about your customers. This is essential unless you’re operating in a monopoly, with a product nobody can live without.

4 Cornerstone Benefits of a Marketing Database to Your Company

1. Improved Communication with Customers

Everything you do with a customer starts at this point. From the first time your customer becomes aware of you, their first request/question for you, the first sale – and the first problem they have! Everything hinges on your ability to communicate effectively and assure them you’re the best company to attend to their needs/wants. A comprehensive data-driven marketing approach puts all the customer’s information at your fingertips.

2. Improved Product Development

You may have started your company without knowing exactly what the majority of your customers wanted. By using data collected over the months and years you’ve been in business, you’ll have a really good idea as to what you can do to improve existing products and create new ones that better serve your customer’s needs. You’re also likely to find product/service improvements that can be made to reduce your costs, thus allowing you to allocate those savings to other areas of customer service, and business improvement and expansion.

3. Increased Sales & Sales Frequency

Obviously, with the points mentioned above, and the fact that your well organized marketing data puts you more in touch with your customers and their needs, you’ll be better able to exploit new opportunities to bring them front-and-center with your products – this includes existing and potential customers.

4. Increased Profitability

Once you have an established marketing database, you’ll soon have a more robust customer service program in place for reducing refunds, lawsuits, and other service related problems that cause companies to bleed unnecessary funds. Improved product development in the form of manufacturing and labor costs will also increase profits. Finally, more sales equals more money.

Your next step

You can’t put a price on the true value a marketing database will have on the future of your company. It literally is the future of your company in each and every way. If you aren’t constantly improving and refining how you collect, store and use data from your customers, you’ll never survive doing business in the data-heavy information era.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive, hands-off database marketing solution for your company, there are platforms that offer you just that.  One of example is Web Decisions, who offer omni-channel customer engagement platform. The company’s alwaysOn marketing database takes care of all the details in collecting, displaying and using your business’s marketing data, so you can focus on your customer.