How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? Whether it’s $5 or $500, expanding your relationship with an existing customer is always more profitable than acquiring a new one (although maybe not as exciting as running a sexy TV campaign or whatever you do to attract business).
The Internet has led to new ways of obtaining marketing data about customers, but old-school methods still work well too. In fact, best practices in capturing information usually require using a combination of strategies to maximize completeness and recency of data, says Scott Cone, vice president/client leader of Lanham, MD-based database marketing company Merkle. Here’s advice from experts on how to effectively gather information and flesh out the data you have.
The pressures of promoting and fulfilling peak-season sales can overwhelm the subtleties of tracking exactly where those sales are coming from. If you have a real-time tracking system or already analyzed your holiday results, you should have a good idea. If you don’t and you didn’t, now is the time to set up your analysis to inform you of what happened and to prepare you for when you’re in the thick of the holidays again.
Building a database of business prospects that have opted in to hear more about your product, company, or industry provides a group of people that are most likely to convert into customers.
If you have specific co-op database models that consistently perform well above your prospecting breakeven threshold, consider reusing unique names from those models in your next drop if your circulation plan calls for additional prospects.
When it comes to bounce data, many companies don
According to the Abacus 2006 B-to-B Industry Insights Report, business-to-business marketers experienced a 9% gain in revenue over the past 24 months, spurred by a 2% increase in buyers with 13% more transactions.
Making a list and checking it twice: That
While transactional e-mail offers the highest open and clickthrough rates of any type of e-mail, Harte-Hanks in 2005 said that most companies continue to send plain-text e-mail with no branding or dynamic cross-sell offers.