Debbie Mayo Smith - January 2013 - Six Strategies For Better Profit From Your Database

There is absolutely more business and referrals waiting for you from the people who are your customers. You can reach them and bring them back through advertising in the media. Or you can maintain a database and bring them back personally.

Maintaining your database is a continuum of effort and should be considered an ongoing evolution. May I ask is the information you collect now all you require or do you believe that you can't tweak and add? Let me give you six strategies to compare to what you are doing now to help you better profit from your marketing database.

1. Never let a viable prospect go

You spent time and money through networking, good customer service, advertising and website development to get prospective customers to your figurative door. Don't waste your money or time spent. Establish a communication stream to keep in contact until they are ready to do business or refer/

2. Excel is Magic

It doesn't matter what database software you use to store your information because it's simple to bring it into Excel to then manipulate, clean, de-duplicate and add to it in seconds flat. Here are a few tricks:

Outlook Contacts to Excel

Copy and paste - change the view to one that has your contact showing by rows instead of as mini business cards (change to company, phone for example). Then simply highlight all (Control + A), and paste into an empty Excel spreadsheet (Control + V).

Export - you can export from your Contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express/Windows Mail to Excel as well as vice versa.  On the Contact File Menu select Import and Export.

Access to Excel - access will copy a file into Excel wit ha push of a button. In 2007 External Data Ribbon > Excel > Export. Prior versions it's through the Tool Menu > Office Links > Analise it with Excel

Other files - CSV, TAB - to bring in the data from any other file, simply save it as a CSV or a TEXT file and open it with Excel.

3. Targeting improves success

I promise you less is more. Send offers to a correctly targeted subsection of your database rather than to the whole list. You might sacrifice a few potential sales, however you'll benefit by the fact you improve the longevity of your database. The individuals on your database will only accept being marketed to so much. Over kill means they unsubscribe literally or emotionally, deleting or throwing out your communications.  Further people are so wary today of signing up because of email overload and past experience with irrelevant communications that each new subscriber should be treated like gold.

Targeting is exceedingly important if you want to maintain a relationship with that customer and prospect. You simply sort your list and select that slice you want to send the mail, email or sms to. Talking about email,

4. Plan for the future today

If targeting improves success - do you have enough information to do so? Have you ever stopped to contemplate what new products, services, customer service initiatives you'd like to do over the next few years? A new branch or store?

What about additional staff? Will you ever need to know or monitor their productivity or their contribution to business? If so how will you measure it? What fields would you need? Phone numbers.  Are you consistently collecting mobile phone numbers so you can do sms messaging in the future?

5. Categories not columns

The last thing you want to do is work with an endless line up of columns.  If you don't plan well from the beginning, you could end up with just too many to manage. The solution is to think instead in Categories.

Wrong Way
You set up separate columns for clients, prospects, old clients, suppliers....... Then you would enter either the person's name in the correct column with  a yes/no or true/false in all others

The Right Way
Instead you set up one column called client type and have different Categories (or variables) you enter into the one column, being client, old client, prospect, supplier. In other words where ever you can create a group, or eliminate the yes/no; true/false with a category - do it.
Worried someone will require two or more variables? Separate them with a comma and you'll still be able to filter for those specific individuals.

6. Treat your business referrers well

Do you have a distinct communication, thank you and reward plan for those business colleagues that refer business your way? Why not? A suggestion to help them could be a tip newsletter about how to improve their business success. Why not create a recurring reminder to prompt you every few months to telephone for a chat.

The more thought you put into developing and using your database, the more you'll be rewarded.

Debbie Mayo-Smith is one of the most in-demand international speakers in Australasia as well as a bestselling author and media columnist.  Debbie helps businesses to save time and boost revenues. Sign up to her quick tip newsletter for ideas and ways to save time and boost business results.