What if you could walk into your office tomorrow, press a button, and clone your best customers? Does this sound far-fetched or impossible? It’s actually much closer to reality than most small business owners and marketing professionals realize.
How can I clone my best customers? The first step is to identify a trusted vendor who specializes in data modeling services, and then send them the customer list. These services are offered both online and typically by local vendors. Since customer information is extremely sensitive, interested parties should always ask for several references before engaging a vendor.
What barriers exist? Certain industries like health care or financial planning may have compliance barriers that need to be cleared before any information can be released to third parties. This may mean privacy releases need to be signed, or it may prevent the exchange of data altogether.
What can I expect in return?
Valuable information about your existing customers: Reports identify common characteristics within the existing customer list-so why is this important? This is important information because a savvy marketer can create campaigns with emotional appeals that correspond to the interests of the existing customers; this leads to a more engaged customer, and ultimately more business.
For example, if the reports indicate that 70% of current customers enjoy opera, then a marketing campaign would scream for a new business pitch that includes 2 free opera tickets. Similarly, high percentages of customers who enjoy golfing, fishing, boating, tennis or knitting may lead to the creation of marketing campaigns catering to these pastimes. Remember, customers are always listening to “WII FM” (What’s In It For Me). Leveraging customer information is the key to tuning into customers and their interests.
Additional data about specific members of the original customer list: This is extremely useful for executing a marketing campaign that resonates with a specific subset of the customer audience. For instance, a group of specific customers could be targeted to launch a new product specifically designed for children. Members of the existing customer audience who were flagged with the “presence of children” would certainly be more interested in these kid-oriented products. Grandparents can often be identified when lists are analyzed, and they are another ideal target audience for children’s products. There are many other valuable pieces of information that can be compiled from members of an existing customer list including marital status, income, assessed property value, favorite pastimes, etc. Knowledge is power, and this information can be used to further segment customers, and to craft smaller campaigns that resonate with the appropriate segments.
Something very close to a cloned customer mailing list: One of the best ways to leverage information from an existing customer list is to have a modeled list created; a modeled list is a new list of customer prospects whose interests and demographics closely match those of the current customer database. This is as close to “cloning” existing customers as possible, and is widely recognized as one of the most effective and efficient ways to grow a customer database.
What are the additional benefits? When analysis is done, customers on an existing list who have relocated or passed away are identified. Nobody wants to mail to customers who have passed away, so this information can be used to purge these customer records from the list. Relocation information can be used to either update address information in the main database, or to purge records from a list completely for businesses with strictly locally based products or services.
The bottom line is that in any mailing campaign, the database is by far the most critical indicator of success. In fact, research from John M. Coe’s book, The Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales & Marketing
