How to maintain a customer database?
Your customer database is extremely important after all your customers are the lifeblood of your business.
Keeping a customer database is a really helpful tool allowing you to; identify customer trends, create customer loyalty and increase their customer communication.
Failing to keep your information up to date, you could mean that you are throwing money down the drain by attempting to reach people whose details have changed.
Here are our top tips on how to create and maintain your database in order to get the most out of it.
- Mandatory Fields – Ensure that the most important information are set as mandatory: like name, email address, phone numbers, and address. This will ensure that you have complete information
- Updating your database – Under the Data Protection Act, you are legally responsible for ensuring that any data you store is accurate and up to date To keep your data up to date, regularly ask customers if their data has changed from that which you already have, the cleaner the data the more accurate it will be
- Backup your information – Any computerised database needs to be backed up daily or twice weekly. Keep these backups in a safe place so that if your computer crashes the information can be easily reloaded.
- Ensure your marketing campaigns are linked to your database – This is extremely important as any emails that bounce can be linked back to your fustomers data and help you cleanse it. It can also provide you with insight into what your customers are responding to, which email campaigns have worked and what they are interested in. All extremely useful information to help you maintain and good relationship with them
- Avoid duplicate contacts– Email addresses are unique so one way to avoid entering duplicate contacts is by comparing the email addresses. If there is more than one entry for a particular contact there is the possibility that neither file contains complete info, yet contains info the other file may not. It is good practice to always merge the duplicate files, rather than deleting one and not the other. This will allow you to compare the information in both files and fill in the gaps, rather than potentially losing important information
Summary:
Now we have given you the basics to keeping your data updated and consistent. Maintaining a good quality database with accurate customer information in takes time, so it is worthwhile putting a great deal of time and effort into it as it will pay dividends in the end. If you follow our tips you will most definitely avoid running into problems, remember a little time and attention can go a long way!
If you would like support on maintaining your database then please speak to us here at Fingertips Typing Services on 0845 300 5245 or email us at info@www.fingertipstyping.co.uk