Rational Marketing

The Aberdeen Group published a report in December, 2009 that explored customer database practices to reveal how organizations are capturing, storing, analyzing and acting on customer data.

The Best Performing Organizations:

• Currently achieve 163% mean class Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI); 9% average year over year growth in ROMI
• 51% year over year mean class growth in revenue

The best performing firms shared several common characteristics, including:

• 46% access a full view of customers across all departments and functions in the organization (versus 14% among laggards)
• 52% improve or enhance customer data through regular marketing and IT collaboration (versus 21% of laggards)

The study recommended that companies wishing to become more like a best performing organization:

• Develop a formal data hygiene (cleansing, enrichment, de-duplication and regular updates) strategy. A lack of formal data hygiene can prevent organizations from using customer data in more personalized engagement.
• Enhance existing records with periodic augmentation and enrichment. Only 32% of all respondents actively augmented customer data for accuracy. But, 48% plan to incorporate database enrichment services in their 2010 budget for improving the customer database.

What can you do to maintain and enrich your customer information?

1. Even if you don’t want to send mail to your customers right now, process your list through the National Change of Address database. This is a simple service that will provide move information for individuals, families, and businesses. Learn more about your current and previous customers by obtaining their current addresses. Our reports will identify undeliverable and incomplete addresses. You will know that some of your valuable customers have had changes in their lives and organizations.
2. Think about enriching your customer list with more information. For consumers we can add income, demographic and home characteristic information to your existing data file. For businesses we can add “firmographic” data including number of years in business, number of employees, industry classification and estimated annual revenue.

If you are not sure what information would be best for your business, we are great at asking the right questions to get you started.