Debbie Mayo-Smith: Tapping into a rich vein with just a keystroke

Our database is your goldmine. Here are six reasons why.

1. THE MONEY
You can spend a significant amount of your marketing budget on trying to turn the unknown masses into your customers. Or you can be clever, successful and economical by communicating with your own private Yellow Pages of past, present and future customers - your database.

2. ABILITY TO ZERO IN
Your database marketing success will be multiplied if you communicate in a targeted fashion. People are overloaded with information. If what you send them via print, email, web and audio is not pertinent or does not add value to them, then they won't digest it - full stop - and, furthermore, you'll very quickly lose their permission to send them your marketing communications. Software allows you to target with a push of a button. It's your lack of data that will hold you back.

3. MOVE WITH SPEED
Where is your customer information now? In your head? With employees who can quit? On index cards or paper files in a metal cabinet? Scattered on 21 lists throughout your computer? In Gmail contacts? In these situations, you can't move with speed; you can't contact many clients in a single stroke. Except perhaps with a cc or blind cc. Don't forget: you lose valuable customer knowledge when an employee leaves.

So, you must take all the information from your head, from your employees' heads, from paper files, from your Outlook contacts or address book, from MYOB or QUICKEN, from your proprietary database and from wherever else you night have stored it and merge it into one place in the computer so you can use it and profit from it. You simply must build a detailed marketing database, or enhance the one you have.

When you have all that customer and prospective customer information in one spot in your computer, you can literally (with the push of a button) create terrific marketing, business development, customer service and communication letters and emails - all personalised with any piece of information in your database.

4. INCREASE YOUR BUSINESSES VALUE
If you were to purchase a business, which would you prefer: one where you have only the billing system to go by for customer information, or one where you have instant access to a marketing database with additional details on customers and prospects too?

A good marketing database contributes to increasing the goodwill component of a company valuation when it is time to sell. With a good database you can increase your profits - both now and later.

5. ANYONE CAN WORK IT
One of the largest hurdles facing the business owner, or the salesperson, is time. When the information is in the database, any assistant can create marketing campaigns, customer prompts or newsletters and send them without the owner or sales rep having to do the manual work. This leaves time to focus on more appropriate activities.

6. EASE OF IMPLEMENTATION
You would not believe how easy it is to figuratively zip customer information together with a business development, sales, educational, customer service or branding message in moments. Personalised with the push of a button. Or how easy it is to merge many lists together, then make fast changes that can save literally days of work. The function "Text to Columns" can split first and last names apart. "Concatenate" will put split last names back into one column. "Exact" can get rid of duplicates (2007 Excel has a remove duplicates function). "Proper" turns words into proper tense instead of all upper or lower.

Debbie Mayo-Smith is a bestselling author and international speaker. Twitter mseffective

www.debbiespeaks.co.nz