Direct Tips on Direct Marketing

Who Are Your Customers? September 9, 2007

Posted by Tim Raines in : analysis, lists , trackback

Direct Tips on Direct Marketing So you’ve got a list of your customers. But what do you really know about them?

I’m always shocked when I speak to marketers who think they know who their customers are, but can’t answer simple questions like:

What percent of your customers are male vs. female?
How many of your customers have incomes over $X?
What is the average age of your customer?
How many people are employed by your average business customer?

The good news is that you can find the answers to these questions (and many more) even if you haven’t stored the dataâ€”or even requested it from your customersâ€”using data appending/overlaying. In fact, sometimes you’ll only need (and you can often get) the answers to the questions without necessarily paying to append the data.

For example, you may only be interested in the answers to decide which lists or list segments to rent for an upcoming promo you’re mailing. Why spend money to send your sales literature to everyone in the state when your best prospects are located in a 50-mile radius of your store? Why go through the effort to market to all consumers when the majority of your customers are over 50 years old?

Before you make any more marketing decisions, get to know your customers first. You may be surprised and shocked by who they really are.