Data is king in today’s modern world of marketing – just ask Coles and Woolworths why they provide their loyalty programs.
it’s not to be generous, it’s to find out information about what you buy and when, so they can target market you with campaigns built around this information.
The objective of each and every marketing campaign that is run is to get 100% of the people contacted to buy. That is the objective in a perfect world. The challenge is achieving this objective cost-efficiently, by ensuring that you are marketing to those people who have a reasonable chance of buying.
Yes, you could just market to everyone by email blast, bulk mail and newspaper advertisements. It would give you more chances of gaining new customers.
However, this approach is not cost-effective and even worse, you begin to alienate those people who become blind to your advertisements. How do you react when you get ads from the same retail outlet with the same or similar offers? You ignore them.
Target marketing when done well will let you have an inexpensive and low risk marketing campaign that will bring good sales and profits to your business. Because this marketing technique will let you send marketing materials to individuals or groups that will likely buy your products or services, you get to save a lot of money and achieve high response rates.
The question now is how do I gather enough information about my customers to optimise the accuracy of my target marketing campaign?
Please note that in the deal;reship world we are not just talking about the customers’ names and addresses and the date of last purchase and date of last service.
We are also talking about what after-market products the customer purchased, their finance contract’s expiry date, extended warranty contracts, roadside assistance and much more.
The answer is data warehousing. Currently dealers have their information spread across their dealer management system, the finance company, after market product supplier, extended warranty provider etc. All of this information needs to be collated into a single data warehouse. This is not difficult or expensive but needs planning.
Imagine the power of your marketing campaign if you could identify those
* commercial customers who purchased a new vehicle from you between 27 and 32 months’ ago
* who have had their vehicle serviced with you in the past 12 months
* whose finance contracts will expire in the next 6 months
* who have an active extended warranty contracts
* who purchased premium window tint and paint protection?
Now you can put together a campaign specifically targeted to these customers rather than a generic package. How much better results do you think you could achieve?
‘Scatter-gun marketing’ was invented by the newspapers and TV and radio proprietors to allow them to sell advertising space. Today, mass marketing is like saying “sale” – it does not mean what it used to. Scatter-gun marketing is the most expensive form of advertising with the lowest rate of success.
Data is king. Gather your data, own it and use it.
Bernard jones
My information
Bernardj@bigpond.net.au
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