Five Trends in Database Marketing

Monday, February 19, 2007

Five Trends in Database Marketing

What are the top five trends in database marketing?
For starters – there’s an increased emphasis on data
hygiene and integration is one of biggest trends in
database marketing.



First came operational databases that ran order
entry and fulfillment activities. From them evolved
marketing databases, which have become central to
overall business strategies. And from those
marketing databases, trends are emerging that affect
how we manage our relationships with customers and
prospects, according to Gary S. Laben, president/CEO
of Richardson, TX-based KnowledgeBase Marketing.
Here are Laben’s picks for the top five database
marketing trends:



* Multichannel support for touch points. “Today’s
marketing databases integrate call centers,
websites, direct response television, lead
management, and affinity activities,” Laben says.
“The marketing database now shapes a customer’s user
experience across interactive or real-time touch
points.”



* Trawling for event-based activities. “With the
help of frequent updates and filtering, you can
search for meaningful activity in a database to
drive your relationship marketing. Searching for
changes in a customer account such as large
purchases or returning goods allows you to trigger a
personal call offering additional services,” Laben
says. Or you can launch an event-based campaign to
react to ‘trigger’ events such as the purchase of
nursery items (which suggests that the buyer is
about to become a parent) or the establishment of a
wedding registry.



* Profitability segmentation. “Typically, database
marketers have segmented by response, building
models to identify the best candidates for their
products. By moving beyond revenue segmentation,
profitability segmentation helps you target those
who are most likely to be profitable. By predicting
profitability, you can better determine how much to
invest in your communications,” Laben says.



* Increased emphasis on data hygiene/integration.
Now that more disparate data can be merged into a
central repository, you’re more likely to see
“conflicts” or discrepancies among the data. “Data
conflicts cause you to not only lose data
efficiency, which is costly, but also the confidence
of both the database users and your customers,”
Laben says. “To address this challenge, there is
greater emphasis on capturing, correcting, and
maintaining accurate data.”



* Affordable prospect database environments. Once
cost-prohibitive, prospect databases aren’t only
affordable, but they can provide a rather rapid
return on investment. “Lower hardware and software
costs, increased competition in outsourced services,
plus enhanced processing capabilities come together
to help marketers expand their database marketing
capabilities while delivering ROI above 100
percent,” Laben says. “The affordable prospect
database is no longer emerging. It is a reality.”