If you have yet to formulate a way to gather information from your customers, now it the time to start. Depending on your business type, there are different options that may be appropriate. If you are a company that invoices its customers then you already have a considerable amount of raw data but if not, think about a way that you could start collecting it; for example, if you are running a restaurant you could create customer feedback cards which, when completed result in the customer being entered into a competition. If you are running a shop you could create your own customer loyalty scheme that gives customers a discount after every 6 visits; whatever you choose, make sure it’s something that your customers are likely to want to participate in – think about what they get from giving you their personal information.

Once you have some data, you need to find a way to manage it. Depending on the size of your business and budget available, this could be a CRM solution such as Act or Salesforce, or just a simple Access database or spreadsheet. Don’t just think about customer contact details; think about what other types of information might be useful when planning future marketing activities. For example, information on age, gender and income may better help you to target specific demographic groups. In turn, this will result in your marketing activities being more targeted and therefore more likely to produce better results for less outlay.

Look for your ideal prospect

Once you have an idea of the type of customer you are looking for, you need to consider adding data to your database so that you have more potential customers to promote your business to. You can purchase or rent marketing lists or build your contacts list from the electoral register. For business prospects, you can look for registration lists for the local chambers of commerce or scan online directories; whilst this is time consuming, I’ve often found this one of the best ways to locate your ideal customers.

Use your data

The more information you can gather about your customers, the better your results will be from marketing campaigns. By understanding, analysing and including your insights when planning your next marketing campaign, it is likely that you will be able to target your perfect customer. It will also highlight trends and patterns in terms of buying behaviour and the frequency of orders. You are more likely to be able to give your customers what they want, when they want it if you make the effort to build an accurate, clean and analysed customer database.

Keep it clean!

Removing irrelevant data and updating information is an important part of your marketing plan as you will quickly go down in your customers/prospects opinion if you send wrongly addressed, irrelevant mailings to them. Additionally, if people ask to be removed from your list, you must honour this request within 28 days. To improve the accuracy of your data, you can use the Royal Mail Postal Address File (PAF) which is a service that checks addresses, postcodes and spelling. You also need to check your data against the Mailing Preference Service (MPS), the Telephone Preference List and the Fax Preference Service (FPS) for people who have opted out of receiving unsolicited marketing.

If you follow the simple steps above, you will soon find that the results of your marketing campaigns are drastically improved as not only will you be targeting the right people at the right time, you will also be building your reputation as a supplier who understands its customers.