Database marketing isn’t a new concept.
However, emerging technology and digital communication has made it easier than ever for businesses to collect information on their leads and customers.
With better information, you can create personalized experiences and the unique content your leads expect.
Learning how to use technology to your advantage is vital: 88% of businesses say buyers expect more relevant and personalized content compared to five years ago.
What is Database Marketing?
Database marketing has been around forever.
Before the internet, companies could collect information on customers and leads through store scanners, surveys, and other means.
Today, however, the internet makes it easy to collect contact information and company firmographics on your leads. Not only that, but you can also collect behavioral data and allow AI to use it in creating a personalized experience.
In the past, using a database might have involved using scanner data to send personalized coupons to a customer’s home. Today, we can use our databases to learn about our audience’s needs and even predict future behavior!
6 Tips and Ideas to Use Database Marketing to Keep Customers and Leads Satisfied
What does database marketing look like in practice in 2020? Here are a few tips, ideas, and tools you can use.
1. Use AI to Verify Lead Data
Effective marketing starts with exact data. Unfortunately, research suggests that 80% of B2Bs will abandon their personalization strategies by 2025 due to low ROI from poor data.
Bad data is truly the silent killer behind an estimated 40% of business objectives.
25% of business databases contain critical errors. Meanwhile, 62% of businesses are relying on data up to 40% wrong to base their marketing decisions.
Artificial intelligence can help make sure your database is clean and healthy.
When someone converts into a lead by providing an email address, an algorithm checks out their public information on sources like LinkedIn to put a list together of:
- Which company they work for
- Their job title
- Their role and duties
- Industry
- Company size
- First and last name
Source: Hushly
Not only does this help you build comprehensive profiles on your leads, but it also means your leads ONLY have to provide an email address. That’s right: No more annoying forms!
2. Create Highly Relevant Content
Database marketing is especially effective for creating highly relevant and valuable content for your audience.
High-quality content is especially important these days because 63% of senior execs say the content they consume daily is far too generic. B2Bs need to do everything they can to stand out and offer nuance to their content.
Using behavioral data, you can segment your audience based on factors like
- Which companies and industries they work in
- Job role and power in the decision-making process
- Stage of the buying cycle
- Common problems and needs
- Recurring interests and topics
You can also segment your audience based on which type of content they like such as:
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Podcasts
- Video
- Case studies and testimonials
3. Send Automated Email Marketing Database Campaigns
Most marketers are already familiar with email as database marketing. However, innovative technology can help you personalize and automate your email marketing.
You can set up detailed campaigns ahead of time and send them out to new leads and current customers.
Start with a personalized welcome campaign for leads in one industry or even specific companies. A few days later, you could send an onboarding campaign explaining how your business can solve their unique problems or meet their needs. Next week, your lead could receive case studies referencing companies similar to your lead’s.
For current customers in your database, you could send personalized emails with relevant coupons, industry blogs, and events based on data in your system.
Of course, you can create these emails far ahead of time and trigger them to go out at specific times. That’s the beauty of AI!
4. Create Personalized Retargeting Ads on Social Media
You can stretch your dollar far on social media when you use data to drive your campaigns.
For starters, you can use your customer database to create personalized campaigns and ask LinkedIn or Facebook to target the specific email addresses or names. Campaigns like these are useful for maintaining relationships with your current customers to prevent churn.
You can follow the same strategy with your leads and build on the conversation. You can even target unknown visitors before they give you their email address. Instead, plug a URL from a personalized blog into the LinkedIn ad creator to target users who visited that specific URL.
5. Try an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Database marketing is perfect for transitioning to an account-based marketing strategy.
When you ONLY collect business email addresses and rely on AI to fill in the company details, you can rest assured knowing that your data is more accurate. Accurate intel is vital to ABM success.
Once you’ve collected a few leads from the same company, you can then create personalized content like blogs, videos, eBooks, and email campaigns.
6. Send a Thank You Message
Of course, nothing beats some good old-fashioned courtesy.
Research shows 80% of buyers will switch vendors in 24 months. It’s safe to say many B2Bs spend too much time generating leads and NOT enough time preventing customer churn.
Email will do simply fine. But why not send some direct mail? A thank you message and a small Starbucks gift card or goodie basket can go a long way. Include a QR code or link to a survey where your customer can tell you how they feel about your service.
Boost Your Content Strategy with AI
Adding AI-driven software to your B2B site can help you skyrocket your database marketing strategy. Instead of relying on outdated data to drive your marketing decisions, AI uses machine learning and works in real time to provide personalized content to every visitor.
Whether a web visitor is a collected lead, current customer, or anonymous browser, you can STILL give them a personalized self-nurturing experience!
