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Whether you run a retail shop, an accounting firm, a caterer, a health club or virtually any small business, your database of customers and prospects will be a key to your business success.
In an era of brutal competition and information overload, such a database is the easiest and least expensive way to maintain a direct relationship with the group of people most critical to the health of the company.
Think of your database as the fuel in your marketing engine, enabling you to run targeted direct mail, e-mail and telemarketing campaigns. These are the marketing and advertising programs that keep your good customers coming back, bring in new ones and, when they work as planned, increase your sales revenues and profits.
Perhaps you are like many businesses owners I talk to who have yet to invest the time and effort required to have a basic customer and prospect database. Or, you started one in the past that is now woefully out of date. This can be costly in the form of forgone revenue and profit.
The computing technology that most of us use every day has made it cheaper and easier than ever to store the names, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers of people who buy from you now, or are likely to buy from you in the future. Then you are able to keep your name in front of them, invite them back, entice them with special offers and reward them for their loyalty.
Depending on the business you are in, there are myriad options for collecting the contact details required to stay in touch, whether it be in your POS system, on an invoice, business card or cocktail napkin. Here are some steps to get started:
1. Take note of when and how other businesses collect contact information from you. When have you felt it to be an intrusion, and when have you been glad to share it; why?
2. Review the various touch points between your business and your customers, and also your potential new customers. Consider the opportunities for collecting or confirming their information: at check-out, on a support call, on the Web, at the end of the sales meeting. Pick at least one.
3. Make the collection of contact information an integrated part of the selected interaction(s), and teach your staff to do it the same way, every time.
4. Store the information immediately into a contact database like Act! ($184 for 10 users, www.act.com) or SalesForce.com ($5 per user, per month for basic contact management, www.salesforce.com). Doing so uniformly and in a timely manner will give you the ability to market your company with precision and for far less money as your database grows. Having to go back and clean up and de-dupe data later on is a costly, messy endeavor, so set it up right from the beginning.
Whether you run a retail shop, an accounting firm, a caterer, a health club or virtually any small business, your database of customers and prospects will be a key to your business success.
In an era of brutal competition and information overload, such a database is the easiest and least expensive way to maintain a direct relationship with the group of people most critical to the health of the company.
Think of your database as the fuel in your marketing engine, enabling you to run targeted direct mail, e-mail and telemarketing campaigns. These are the marketing and advertising programs that keep your good customers coming back, bring in new ones and, when they work as planned, increase your sales revenues and profits.
Perhaps you are like many businesses owners I talk to who have yet to invest the time and effort required to have a basic customer and prospect database. Or, you started one in the past that is now woefully out of date. This can be costly in the form of forgone revenue and profit.
The computing technology that most of us use every day has made it cheaper and easier than ever to store the names, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers of people who buy from you now, or are likely to buy from you in the future. Then you are able to keep your name in front of them, invite them back, entice them with special offers and reward them for their loyalty.
Depending on the business you are in, there are myriad options for collecting the contact details required to stay in touch, whether it be in your POS system, on an invoice, business card or cocktail napkin. Here are some steps to get started:
1. Take note of when and how other businesses collect contact information from you. When have you felt it to be an intrusion, and when have you been glad to share it; why?
2. Review the various touch points between your business and your customers, and also your potential new customers. Consider the opportunities for collecting or confirming their information: at check-out, on a support call, on the Web, at the end of the sales meeting. Pick at least one.
3. Make the collection of contact information an integrated part of the selected interaction(s), and teach your staff to do it the same way, every time.
4. Store the information immediately into a contact database like Act! ($184 for 10 users, www.act.com) or SalesForce.com ($5 per user, per month for basic contact management, www.salesforce.com). Doing so uniformly and in a timely manner will give you the ability to market your company with precision and for far less money as your database grows. Having to go back and clean up and de-dupe data later on is a costly, messy endeavor, so set it up right from the beginning.
5. If you don’t have one, develop a marketing plan for the coming year. Keep it simple - one page may be just fine - and list the campaigns you plan to run using the database, including e-mail, direct mail and phone. Also, estimate the work effort, hard dollar costs and other resources required, and how you plan to measure effectiveness.
Your company websites may already be a generating a steady source of fresh contacts. But many businesses find that generating Web leads is not as easy as it first sounds. You need to invest in a site that appeals to your target market, usually through interactivity, relevant content and great design.
In addition, the site should be optimized with keywords so your target audience finds you on Google and other search engines. Tech-savvy people can do this successfully on their own using a tool such as Word Tracker ($59/month, www.wordtracker.com).
Another option is to outsource search-engine optimization (known as SEO) to a company such as AdzZoo or HubSpot.
Once you have been able to generate the Web traffic and are seeing a steady flow of leads, the data can be automatically added into your database by most website content management systems.
If you plan to do regular e-mail marketing, an e-mail marketing service can also collect and store the data for you. If you really want this to look professional and generate results, use such services as Constant Contact, Vertical Response, JangoMail or AWeber (normally under $40 per month). These services are more than worth the cost for 99 percent of business because they save so much time, and they keep you in compliance with anti-spamming laws and norms.
Perhaps most importantly, give someone on your staff the responsibility for necessary data entry and management of a top quality database. This is a critical step because a profitable database is something that grows over time. Ensure that this person or people have the proper tools, clear quality criteria, and make it part of their performance evaluation and bonus equation.
Steve Rovniak of Natick is president of Beacon Business Coaching, a Natick firm which advises small business owners. He can be reached at www.beaconbusinesscoaching.com.
