Using data intelligently

If you collect data from your customers, use it, don't let it just sit there. Remember how for years with every transaction Radio Shack collected your address, and never did a damn thing with it? No wonder they are closing so many stores. Meanwhile, the catalog-based marketing business continues to grow, despite the Internet. (As I wrote in 1994, the Internet-World Wide Web would merely be another distribution channel for direct marketing.)

I got this from the Augusta Chronicle. But lots more databases have my birthday information.
(In the email this is an animated gif but I can't seem to make the animation work in the blog.)

One of the best books written on selling, How to Sell Anything to Anybody by Joe Girard, describes how he became the world's most successful car salesman. It was because he figured three things:

(1) that people buy more than one car, but that they usually bought cars from different salespeople each time;
(2) because salespeople didn't work to build a relationship with the customer;
(3) and that as you built these relationships, you could extend the sales relationship to the friends of your own satisfied customer.

Girard was one of the first car salesman to develop a regular mail campaign to his list of customers. He would mail something each month, such as a happy St. Patrick's day card in March. The one month he didn't have a particular event to mail about, that's when he sent his "happy birthday" card. Granted for many it wasn't the right month, but they appreciated the gesture.

Interestingly enough, there is another great book on sales, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, by Frank Bettger, first published in 1949! Bettger sold insurance, but learned about relationship selling too. He made the same point, that in his lifetime he bought 33 cars, but almost never from the same person.

Too many businesses focus on first-time customers and inadequately mine their current customer base.

Direct marketing is all about building the lifetime value of customers through subsequent sales.

Index Keywords: retail