Building and Managing Your Marketing Database, Cont.
Lesson 4: TRACKING TRANSACTIONS
Transaction data with your leads or customers should be kept at all costs. Every single transaction -- every piece of data -- for as long as you have been in business -- should be archived. This is some of the most critical data you can track on your leads and customers. And now that we're in the information age and computer storage is so cheap, there are very few reasons to get rid of it anyway.
Transactions can take the form of any interaction that you have with your customers or your prospective customers. That includes survey responses, pre-sales inquiries (phone or otherwise), returns, after sales support, and of course, purchases.
Below are some of the major sources of transaction data:
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Pre-sales inquiries
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Customer files
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Orders and returns
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Customer service |
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Payments
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Application forms (membership, credit, etc.) |
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Overlay services (demographics, etc.) |
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Market research (surveys) |
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Promotions (mail, print, email marketing, web banner ads, email newsletter sponsorships, etc.) |
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Telemarketing / telesales
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Electronics (radio, TV, World Wide Web) |
Tracking transactions helps you build up your prospect list. Let’s take a pre-sales inquiry as an example. I hear about your product and I decide to find out more, so I give your company a call. When I get connected to your customer service representative, I say, “I’m interested in product XYZ. My friend has it, and he thought it would be really good for my company. But I have a few questions.” My inquiry should be tracked, even if I don't make a purchase. Because my name will be very valuable next time you run a targeted marketing campaign.
You want to track transactions with prospective customers so that you can analyze what it takes to close a sale. Let's take an enterprise software developer as an example.The company has a $50,000 product for sale. If the company analyzed every transaction with a prospect, they might find that customers typically download a white paper, attend a seminar, get several follow up calls from a sales rep and then have an on-site meeting before they actually make a purchase. Well, how can you shorten that cycle? From the moment you start making a relationship with a prospect, you should be tracking what it takes to close the sale. That way you can figure out how to decrease that cost later. You need to analyze all the steps that you took to get that sale, in order to understand how to improve on them later.
Once a lead becomes a customer, tracking transactions with that customer allows you to analyze buying patterns. For example, let's take a catalog company selling bed, bath and kitchen products. Customer A comes in with an initial purchase of flatware.What are customer A's buying patterns after that initial purchase? If you analyze this, you may find out in five years that someone who comes in with an initial purchase of flatware is worth a lot more than someone that comes in through organizational items. The latter customer might buy two or three items, and then stop being a customer.
Tracking transactions helps you manage costs. Take return orders for example. Let’s say you’re a cataloguer. It’s highly likely that you have at least one customer that keeps buying and returning products. We all know the type –- each time he orders, he orders one in every shade and then returns all but one. Of course we don’t want to sell to this guy anymore because he costs us money. So we’re going to want to flag this customer’s file with, “Do not solicit”. That way each time we run a promotion with this list, his name will be removed.
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