Building a Customer Database is VITAL

It might sound like simple common sense – building a customer marketing database for your business – but in the real world, very few businesses actually do this properly.

At it’s most basic, your database should be used for communicating with your customers at least once a month. A monthly Newsletter can be an ideal starting point for many businesses.

You need to start collecting customer details right now, if you haven’t already been doing so. Names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses are the minimum information you should be collecting. Depending on your business, you may also want to collect additional data such as gender, age and date of birth, purchase history and much more.

You can utilise your database and communicate with customers and prospects by a variety of methods.

• Traditional Post
• Email
• Mobile Text Message (SMS)
• Instant Messaging
• Social Media

We recommend that you use an all-in-one system that will utilise one database and can communicate through all of the above methods simultaneously. This obviously saves you a lot of time. You can operate this simple system yourself for a small monthly fee, or you can pay a little more and have someone manage everything for you.

An ideal Email Marketing solution, which is FREE for up to 1000 contacts is MailerLite. Give it a try.

A method of automating data collection helps tremendously as well. We can encourage customer sign-ups through online enquiry forms and even by advertising a short SMS number for prospects to text. An example might be “Text ‘MOT’ to 60607 for a £25 MOT this month!”. Competitions and online games can also work very well for certain businesses to encourage sign-ups.