Need to find Customers?

If you are currently trying to grow your customer base I am sure you are thinking about how and where you are going to find new prospects. In today’s economy we need to be as smart as possible how we spend our marketing dollars. We need to target our marketing so it reaches prospects that are likely to buy our products or services. To assist in this endeavor I outlined several techniques that I have used to grow a clients customer base.

• First understand your existing customers. This is critical to do before you waste money chasing prospects that are unlikely to buy your product. Who are your customers? What is their age, income, are they homeowners or renters, do they have investable assets, do they have children? Depending on your product the demographic attributes you analyze will vary. You need to understand what attributes are predictive in your data in order to find good prospects or to up sell existing customers more efficiently.

• Now that you know what your customers look like you need to group them into like segments. Once this is done look at your sales data and identify the profitability of each segment. Then you can determine what segments you should aggressively pursue and which you should stop wasting money on.

• Once you have segmented your customers go out and look for prospects that fit within your most profitable or most responsive segments. I will outline where to look for prospects in upcoming articles.

• Next score your customers and prospect data. The score can be based on profitability or response rate depending on what you want to accomplish. For example we might choose to score customers by profitability. You will segment the customer into deciles from one to ten. One being the group we want to spend the most marketing dollars on and ten being the least. If you have the time and money building a model is preferable. This essentially takes many attributes of your data and generates a more accurate composite score.

• Make sure your data is clean as possible. You don’t want to waste your time attempting to communicate with invalid, duplicate or out of date customer information. Best case is you will waste your money and time. Worst case is you irritate your customers and we don’t want to do that.

• Remember the old adage location, location, location. Depending on your business or product the proximity to your customer can be the most important factor in acquisition or retention. Map out the locations of your high profit prospects. This is relatively simple with today’s technology. It may point out some surprising facts you haven’t considered.

• Keep a history of your marketing communications. This is the only way to determine the success or failure of your campaigns. With this history you will be able to test your message, offer, channels and segments to see if they are performing as you expect? You will also be able to track your marketing ROI. You can see an article about the advantages of a marketing database on my blog.

The quality of your data and knowledge of it can unlock fantastic profits and efficiencies. The preceding is just a short list of ideas to improve the profitability of your customer acquisition. I hope this got you to think of new ways you can improve your marketing.

Regards

Scott
CRMWhiz.com