Three Ways to Build Your Database
Thursday, 22 December 2011 13:33
Agh! Data! The very word sends shivers down the spine of many a marketer. It brings up feelings of frustration and stress and visions of prematurely gray hair. But databases don’t have to be scary or overwhelming. Let’s look at the three primary ways that marketers can build a database.
1. Buying a List
You might be amazed just how detailed you can be when requesting data. You can request all manner of demographics, including age, gender, ZIP code, income, home ownership, number of children, age of children, and more.
The more detailed the data, of course, the more it will cost, so it’s important to understand who you are targeting and why so you can determine the value of each piece of demographic information.
2. Do a List Append
If you already have a list and want to do more with it, you can purchase just the data you need. Let’s say you have names and addresses but want to know household incomes, the number of children under 18 living at home, or whether people own a home. No problem—you can purchase just that data.
In these cases, the data house will provide you with a list that has been “triple checked,” which means that the data has been verified from three different sources.
3. Customer Surveys
Rather than buy data, you can gather your own. This is one of the values of personalized URLs. You send customers or prospects to their unique URLs where they are asked to answer a variety of questions. Once they complete the survey, the results will be appended back to your database automatically.
You can set up the survey so that the questions are mandatory or non-mandatory. If your goal is to gather email addresses, for example, you can require respondents to fill in that field before moving on to the next page (and before they are able to claim some kind of incentive).
Over the next several weeks, we’ll look at each one of these database-building approaches in more detail. Also look for Darwill’s white paper, “Three Easy Ways to Build Your Database,” which will be coming out shortly.
