Building a customer database

Having a good customer database will allow your business to grow or maintain its current level. Your customer database will be the best tool you have during hard times and the best tool you have when you need to maximize your profits. Typically a good customer database includes as much information as possible about your customers.

Your company should be collecting information on your customers. You need to know who is buying your products and why. The overall goal of your database will be to maximize your customer value and maintain retention and repeat sales. Your customer database will help you discover new ways to market and find ways to increase customer satisfaction.

When you begin building your customer database, you need to decide what information is important and pertinent to your business. A customer database should be much more than just a collection of names. Your customer database should include information that will allow for targeted marketing campaigns. Here are some common things customer databases usually include:
-

• Name, job function and title, company name, address, and phone number. Personal information (home phone, address).


• - The market the individual is in or their service needs


• - The level of buying the customer provides to your company (are they a repeat customer?)


• - Billing information


• - Recent promotions mailed and the response ratio

If you do not wish to build your customer database yourself, you can hire companies or rogue entrepreneurs to do it for a small fee. You can also purchase specific, targeted mailing lists from other companies who have an established database. It is relatively easy to create your own customer database with programs like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access.

The largest problem many companies face with customer databases is disorganization and outdated information. If you have a customer database, you should only allow one or two people the ability to update information. By limiting the number of users who have access to the database, you will eliminate confusion or duplicated records. It is fine to allow everyone to read the records, but just don't give everyone at the company access to edit the database.

You must also make sure you can easily sort the information in the database. Arranging the data into groups and categories will help you with targeted marketing campaigns. Another thing to keep in mind is the number of different databases you have. You should only have one or two databases: one for a list of existing customers and another for a list of potential customers. Having more than one database will cause duplicated records, lost information, and overall confusion for everyone when you go to pull a listing. No matter what the customer purchases, they are still a customer so it is just easier to keep them in same file with all your other customers instead of in separate files.

Always update your database. You can waste hundreds or thousands of dollars on old, outdated information. There is no point to send a filer to a customer who moved or who asked to be removed from your system. Keep all the records of old customers in a file so you don't wind up buying the same names from a list broker. Updating your customer database on a regular basis will help you from wasting money and will help you from creating a duplicate entry if a sale is coming in from a client who already exists in your system, but has changed names or companies.

Customer information is extremely important and valuable to your company. Be sure to inform your customers your policy on your customer database. Some individual do not want their name sold to outside companies, while other customers may not have a problem with this.