I recently downsized my life by moving into a small house in a pleasant, but older, neighborhood. With the kids gone I no longer need all the space and this is much easier to take care of. The only thing I really miss about the big house is the garage. When I first moved in to the new place a lot of stuff just got stacked into its small one car garage out of necessity. Boxes of unnecessary junk, remodeling supplies and materials, paint, appliances, tools all went into this cramped space. Before I knew it, my garage looked like this.
| (Not my actual garage.) |
The first winter came and went with record snowfall and by Spring I was determined to get my truck back into my garage.
I was working in my yard over the weekend and my neighbor stopped by and asked me if I had sold my truck. I laughed and opened the garage door to show him my F150 neatly tucked into its new home. He had seen my garage in its previous state and was shocked, “Dude, how’d you get all that stuff outta there?” he asked.
I answered simply, “A little at a time.”
Organizing your data can be a lot like cleaning my garage. If you try to clean up a mess that big all at once, it looks impossible, leads to frustration and ultimately failure. That’s why I recommend you begin with your top 100. Everyone has heard of the 90/10 rule. 90% of your business comes for 10% of your customers. If that holds true for your business, you should be targeting this segment for intensified marketing already. Chose fifty current customers who you believe could be spending more with you and chose the fifty prospects you believe have the most potential for sales revenue and build a database template using these records.
| Sample Customer Data |
This is what most companies’ customer data looks like, it’s contact information, and it’s a good place to start but you need make sure you begin with everything formatted correctly.
Always divide contact names into separate first and last name fields. You may want to add a field for middle name as well. When you use this list to personalize a mail piece, you don’t want it to read “Hi Elmer Fudd” or “Hi Elmer J.” You want it to read like you are speaking to a friend, “Hi, Elmer.” Make sure everything is spelled and punctuated correctly, I would suggest outlawing the use of all caps company wide. It’s a bad look on most marketing pieces and can be difficult to fix in most database fields. If you need all caps for a particular piece, most variable data software will let you format text that way regardless of how it is entered in the database, but none I know of will generate proper capitalization from all caps. Additionally, you need to make sure your contact for each account is actually the decision maker for purchasing your product. Marketing to persons not authorized to make purchasing decisions seldom bears fruit.
The address fields should be formatted using postal bulk mail requirements. You can find these here.
You may not be ready to take advantage of bulk mail rates at this time but it could save you a lot of time, money, and headaches if you use these guidelines from the beginning. You may want to set up separate fields for a second address line, a PO Box, suite or room numbers, and a plus four zip code, depending on how you wish to organize your data. All of this information will have to be mapped to a mail file later so if you want to separate all of this data, you may also want to include a separate field for “mailing address.”
Phone numbers, especially cell numbers, should be entered consistently in the simplest format possible, either with dashes or no separators at all. Mobile marketing text generators vary, but most will allow these two formats.
Once you have all of these guidelines in place, enforce them. Everyone entering customer information into whatever system you are using should be held accountable for entering that data correctly and there should be consequences for not doing so. If these consequences include some type of financial pain, you will find you will always have good, usable data.
When all of this is done, you will be ready to begin tapping into the power of personalization. Next time we will begin to expand on this data to help make your marketing truly speak to all of your customers.