With marketing dollars declining, it is more important than ever to communicate to customers and prospects most likely to purchase. Your customer base is your best resource for generating additional revenue and determining your best possible prospects. In order to utilize this valuable resource, your must learn as much as possible about them.
Third party data providers can determine important facts about your customers by simply matching your database of names and addresses to theirs. Types of information available are age, income, education, marital status, presence of children, credit score, and on and on. Once these details are known, data analysis can be used to determine what a customer of your product “looks like”. This data intelligence will enable you to create a customer profile for each product in your portfolio.
Customer profiles create the ability of a company to increase sales in a couple of ways. The first way is to cross-sell to current customers. By using the profiles of customers currently purchasing certain combinations of products in your portfolio you can determine the next best product to sell to each customer. Secondly, these profiles also give you guidelines for acquiring prospects. Third party data providers can provide prospect lists based on detailed demographics that you determine through the customer profiling. In essence you are determining the next product to sell your customers and the next prospect to sell your product. Follow up with lead management processes such as direct mail marketing and both approaches translate into additional revenue.
