In other words, take every opportunity during your day-to-day interactions with customers and prospects to get the necessary contact details and enter them into your database.
Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Marketing Handbook’ to find out why taking every opportunity to capture customer data can benefit your business.
It is often as simple as collecting the business cards of those you talk to every day. Make sure you tell them you would like to add them to your database and keep them updated by email.
A great example of a sizeable database being collected mainly via offline methods is New Zealand sports shoe retail chain Shoe Clinic. When making a purchase, Shoe Clinic shoppers are encouraged to fill in a form and join the Shoe Clinic Advantage Club, which includes a loyalty points and rewards programme.
Over the past 10 years, Shoe Clinic has built a database of well over 100,000 members around the country, 90% of
which has been collected at point of sale. As early adopters of online relationship marketing, they now enjoy the benefits of a communications channel direct to their existing customers, which they regularly use to build relationships and promote products.
Action Property Services collects the contact details, including the email address, from every client they do a service for. The details are entered into their database automatically triggering a thank you email, and then a reminder email every three months.
Despite the fact the biggest opportunity for collecting data is often offline, you should still gather online data by encouraging your website visitors to join your database. This involves a strong “join pitch”, and can be as simple as a compelling e-newsletter, or something like a monthly prize draw.
A couple of examples: Shoe Clinic generates a lot of online sign-ups through a monthly prize draw for a pair of running shoes, and all Action Property Services’ online enquirers are automatically added to their database.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
