Debbie Mayo-Smith: On a mission to filter, target and reward

There is more business and more referrals waiting for you from the people who are your customers. You can reach them and bring them back through advertising in the media. Or you can maintain a database and bring them back personally.

Maintaining your database is an ongoing effort and should be seen as an evolutionary process. Is the information you collect now all you require, or do you believe that you can tweak and add? Let me give you six strategies to compare with what you are doing, to help you better profit from your marketing database.

NEVER LET A VIABLE PROSPECT GO

You spent time and money through networking, good customer service, advertising and website development to get prospective customers to your figurative door. Don't waste that money and time; establish a communication stream to keep in contact until they are ready to do business or refer.

EXCEL IS MAGIC

It doesn't matter what database software you use to store your information because it's simple to bring it into Excel to then manipulate, clean, and add to in seconds flat. Here are a few tricks:

1) Outlook contacts to Excel

Copy and paste: change the view to one that has your contacts showing by rows instead of as mini business cards. Then simply highlight all (Control + A), and paste into an empty Excel spreadsheet (Control + V).

Export: You can export your contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express/Windows Mail to Excel as well as vice versa. On the Contact file menu select Import and Export.

2) Access to Excel

Access will copy a file into Excel with a push of a button. In version 2007, on the ribbon it is External Data > Excel > Export. With earlier versions it is through the Tool Menu > Office Links > Analyse it with Excel.

3) Other files - CSV, TAB

To bring in the data from any other file, simply save it as a CSV or a text file and open it with Excel.

TARGETING IMPROVES SUCCESS

I promise you, less is more. Send offers to a correctly targeted subsection of your database rather than to the whole list. You might sacrifice a few potential sales, but you'll benefit by the fact you improve the longevity of your database.