How Database-Marketing works - an Overview

Database-Marketing basically consists of two major tasks - Marketing-Analysis and implementation of the resulting strategies. To optimally support your business we suggest that you follow the standard business process of:

• Analysis
• Planning
• Implementation
• Controlling

As a process-map the core-process of database-marketing can be represented as the standard and already wellknown circle:

What this graphic clearly shows is that this process actually is a continuous circle, meaning that from any previously implemented activity you learn what you can improve for the next activity.

Database-Marketing helps you to perform multi-stage pretests, even with heavy parallel testing of different concepts. Using statistical methods you can extract the most successful parameters from the different concepts and design one solution covering all the winning factors in one package!

By using this method and by continuously implementing what you have learned from previous lessons Database-Marketing really can be a tool to leverage your business success into market-leadership!

Analysis:

Certainly analysis is the key success-factor to profitable Marketing activities. The more profound and in detail you can analyze the problem and the parameters that might have an impact on it, certainly the better you can approach it and find tailored solutions.

Analysis is one of the very strengths of Database-Marketing. During the analysis-phase Database-Marketing will support you by providing information at your fingertips. Not only that there will be information where - using standard-tools - there would be none or only very restricted, but depending on the setup most of this information can be condensed into key-factors, which will allow a more event-driven and data-driven Marketing (in the sense of doing something when the time is perfectly right).

Planning:

During the planning-phase support by Database-Marketing concentrates on cross-checking assumptions made during the planning-process. It gives you an environment where you "play around". By using the experience from previous activities you even may be able to predict results of a current promotion-design.

If you come up with several different solutions for your activity, you may use Database-Marketing as a validation- and evaluation-tool. Meaning: by defining test-groups you can test the business impact of different design, by using statistical methods you can extract the key success-factors from different designs and develop a single solution that covers all of them.

Implementation:

Implementation is the time when you will see the real strengths of a specific activity (or its weaknesses). By carefully choosing the target market-segment you will be able to market only the relevant prospects. Setting up control groups will allow you to calculate the performance of this particular promotion versus standard business.

Database-Marketing gives you all the support you will need for both segmentation and selection of high-potential customers and testing the power of a certain activity versus "business as usual". Since you can select your customers by ANY of the parameters you have on your records, targeting is getting to its original meaning. There will be no longer a need to only estimate a market-potential, but you can go directly into your database and query the total population for matching criterias.

If you have already been using Database-Marketing for some time, you even can predict the results of your promotion with a rather high reliability - just by comparing the current promotions with previous lessons learned.

Controlling:

Continuous controlling of the performance of your business performance and especially of promotions helps to monitor success or failure. By knowing this as early as possible you might save a lot of your budget (if you are facing a failure) or (if you could launch a success) can take steps to allocate additional resources to keep things going.

With the facilities of ad-hoc queries of huge data, condensing data into relevant information and providing these results in an easy-to-handle-GUI, Database-Marketing again shows it flexibility and power. Tracking results and impact on business is accessible even to people who - under "normal" circumstances would have to ask other departments for this information.