Database marketing is fast becoming a buzzword in the industry. What is database marketing and what can it do for you and me as marketers? In a nutshell, it can make us more effective at reaching our customers, help us move the most likely customers to purchase, save us money so we can do more with our marketing budgets, and provide us with measurements on the performance of our marketing plans. This sounds miraculous, but database marketing can help us achieve just that.

Generally most of us call ourselves direct marketers. As direct marketers, we try to elicit a response from our customers, such as filling out a business reply card , attending a seminar, or sampling a product. Usually this response is phoned, faxed, or emailed into the company, and then we send the customer something in return.

Database marketing implies that the target audience for our direct marketing efforts is generated from a computer database of names, which resides within the company (your house file) or is rented from an outside source. The entries in these lists are usually characterized (profiled) by numerous factors, so sub-lists may be produced of customers that are more likely to respond to a given tactic. When a customer response is received, this information is also recorded in the database. As time progresses, more information collects in the customer files providing an even more complete picture of their buying habits or potential.

As the definition suggests, database marketing is not static. In a good system, you will know that customer X has interest in your protein expression products, has responded to particular communications on your protein expression products, and hopefully, has bought your protein expression products every 4 months for the last year. The more a marketer knows about his/her customers, the better able that marketer can target customers with communications and products. This is basic marketing sense, only it’s easier and more powerful using computers.

Who’s the customer?

The idea of database marketing relies on basic market segmentation principles. In order to develop the most targeted marketing program, you want to find only those customers interested in your specific product. You also know that this is a subset of a larger group and that not all of the subset will be interested in buying from you for whatever reasons. For example, you have a list of all life scientists in North America. You also "just know" that not all the scientists in the list use protein expression products. How do you find those that do? Or those that might use them in the future? Or those customers who currently buy them from you?

Database marketing provides a very powerful, targeted approach to reaching specific customers. Many of you already work with databases that characterize customers by areas of interest. If your systems are good, you also know who is interested in specific products AND buys those products from you. By gaining more information from your customers from sources like customer services, technical services, literature requests, and sales force contacts, a more complete picture of the target may emerge, leading you to new ways to identify potential customers. Also, there are numerous computer programs based on a number of different models that can help you identify higher potential customers using the information available. See BioTactics in Action, Database Modeling.