How is Database Marketing Revolutionizing Company Customer Relationships?

Today, almost every company has its Customer Database. Banks, insurance companies, hospital and research centers, online sellers, and even fast food companies have their databases. Each customer action including registration, login, navigation, and purchase generates enormous volumes of data that contribute to the company database.

A rewarding data lake

Such actionable data can help companies create more relevant products that customers want to use. In addition to the product designing and marketing process, your company can also fulfill additional customer needs including timely surveys, post-sales services, automated emails, notifications, and product suggestions.

All these need to consider the data coming from the customer interactions on the merchant website, social media mentions, and all possible tools collecting similar data.

Customer segmentation and targeting

A rich data lake can help data experts determine the types of customers in your target group. Your database will contain all kinds of consumer data including buying habits, viewed pages, products in wish lists, products in baskets, shopping cart abandoners and demographics.

If your database is organized enough, you can target each customer and design individual product promotions for them. However, since that is too unrealistic, precise data can help in customer segregation and present specific groups with individualized promotional offers.

Database marketing and CRM

Best CRM software makes use of customer data and feasible interactions to create high-quality customer service and communication. Relationship marketing is an essential element of customer relationship management. Combining this with your efforts of customer segmentation can help you create amazingly personalized marketing efforts for your target audience.

There are a plethora of CRM and database tools you can use for this purpose. While we have tools the automatically drive leads, we also have tools that help with shopping cart abandonment issues. Whether your problem lies at the top of the sales funnel or the very bottom, you will find helpful tools to deal with them.

Why Should You Be Thinking About Database Marketing?

This brings us to the place where we start thinking if marketers should go for database marketing or rely on more conventional marketing practices.

Well, let us weigh a few pros and cons before we conclude –

Pros

Targeted marketing: Database marketing helps you to use business intelligence (BI) to make informed decisions about your customers, product designs, and promotions. Marketing segmentation becomes much more accurate with the practice of targeted marketing.

Brands can always analyze their customer database to find common factors among customers who buy certain products and use their defining traits to find new customers on social media. You can always extrapolate the results of a query and use it to find new customers in your immediate market.

Better customer relationship: Database marketing is great for improving your relationship with your customers. This is true for almost all sales and services companies. This also increases the add-on sales potentials for customer-based businesses.

It is as simple as walking into a shop where the cashier has known you for the last few years. He or she knows which brands you like, which colors you wear and what products you buy. Except, here, the database is not dealing with a single customer. The database is dealing with possibly millions while paying attention to the need of each individual customer.

Customer-first approach: The evolution of digital marketing and EPS are scaring traditional business leaders. More business tycoons are thinking that database marketing is making sellers more tech-focused. Well, they couldn’t be more wrong. All the accessible information in the database is making the process more customer-eccentric than it ever was possible.

The meticulous data collection process from multiple interaction points is creating a redundancy that is eliminating data lapses and errors. The database has all the information about customer interests, likes, and dislikes. This is a considerable step towards targeted, personalized marketing, which was never seen before the advent of database marketing.

Cons

Cost-consuming: The only drawback of the process seems to be the cost. Yes, maintaining a cumulative database can be costly. Especially since the database has to have certain levels of redundancy to eliminate the data gap, the need for DBAs becomes indispensable.

Maintaining an in-house team of experienced DBAs with at least one senior data expert can be quite harrowing for a new company. On top of that, CRM requires a new infrastructure for regular use. While some companies do buy all the software and hardware for creating their CRM infrastructure, database management system and meet their hosting needs.

Most SMBs do not have sufficient funds to do so. Since it involves a lot of upfront purchases and recurring license costs, many companies rely on third-party providers.

Bottom Line

Database marketing helps to improve a company’s relationship with its customers by providing appropriate customer segmentation, product suggestion and promoting targeted marketing. It may be costly at the moment, but it is also imperative for an AI-driven future.

Chirantan Patel

Chirantan Patel is the Product Manager at Softwaresuggest & Callhippo, an Inc. 275 company that researches and analyzes software to educate, advise, and connect buyers and sellers of business technology.