How hard is your customer database working?

March 18, 2016

In these highly competitive times, a company’s customer database is a powerful engagement tool and an extremely valuable asset. How you use your customer database can be the difference between being invisible and being top of mind in your market.

Are you using yours to its full potential?

We find many businesses, especially those with legacy databases, still use a spread-sheet or some other basic means to collect and store customer data. These may be great for keeping things simple. However, their capacity for integration into social media marketing campaigns, and email campaigns is limited.

Breathing life back into your database, and making it work for you, is essential. At em Creative, we would argue that your database is your greatest potential source of business and highly valuable in maintaining customers, improving brand awareness, and increasing sales in your target markets.

In order to fully maximise the power of your database you will need to:

Authenticate your database

Make sure all the contact details you have are correct, and that they are relevant to your current and future products, offers and/or services.

Use your database

Once you have updated your database, you can develop strategies to keep your existing customers engaged, grow your database, increasing it’s inherent value and expand your list of potential customers.

Email blasts are a popular method of engagement, and there are a number of email system that can be used to facilitate your campaigns. They enable you to easily and effortlessly distribute and track marketing campaigns across various channels, and devices. But be mindful of anti-spam legislation and people’s short attention spans; you need to ensure the content you distribute is valuable to your customer, and the frequency of your emails is enough to stay top of mind, but not bordering on ‘inbox harassment’.

This is where it pays to have a content strategy. Programs that allow you to easily send graphically appealing emails have been designed with simple to use interfaces that most people can use, however not matter how pretty your emails look, the effectiveness of an email campaign lies in the strategy behind it.

At em Creative, we believe using email campaigns strategically, with engaging, relevant content connected to measurable results that will increase the value of your database and become a powerful sales and marketing tool.

For example, to grow your database, use an opt-in offer to attract the audience you are looking for. In the tourism industry for example, you might consider last-minute deals, city guides, free gifts, downloadable travel tips, or e-books to entice sign ups.

Strategic email communication

The keys to successful email communication are

Setting objectives

Part of your strategy should be creating a set of measurable objectives for your emails. What do you hope to achieve, and is your current strategy working?

Tracking response

Using your chosen program, you can track who is opening your emails, and what people are clicking on. This information becomes more valuable as you start to segment your list and become more targeted in your communications.

Nurture

But it doesn’t stop there. Nurturing your customer database means maintaining respectful contact and giving them reasons to stay interested. Ongoing engagement by way of new product releases and special offers, even announcing staff changes if your business is one-on-one service focussed, keeps your customer feeling involved, valued and a part of the community you are building.

A hard working customer database is the lifeblood of your business. So, engaging – and re-engaging – your customers requires a strategic approach, to ensure success and to allow the most efficient use of your marketing budget.

At em Creative we have extensive experience in creating strategic email campaigns, and template designs. We can help you utilise, grow and nurture your database so you and your customers get full value.

Categories: Digital Marketing
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