Data Driven Marketing For Dummies

Chapter 4

Using and Managing Your Customer Contact Information

In This Chapter

Understanding the different methods of contacting customers

Knowing when to leave your customers alone: opting in and out

Offering your customers some preferences

Name and address data as well as other contact information play a central role in your database. You cannot communicate with your customers without knowing how to reach them. This contact information also plays a key role in bringing customer data together. An e-mail address, for example, is what allows you to associate all of a user’s browsing history with a single customer. In a loose sense, that e-mail address is the customer.

In this chapter, I discuss some pros and cons of communicating using different channels. I also discuss the basics of managing and maintaining customer contact information. Finally, I point out the importance of allowing customers to opt out of hearing from you.

Contacting Your Customers

The whole point behind database marketing is to enable you to contact your customers. But there are a variety of ways of doing this. Tradition mail using the USPS is always an option. But you have other options as well. E-mail, phone, ...