Strategic Database Marketing: The Masterplan for Starting and Managing a Profitable, Customer-Based Marketing Program

Not only the most thorough guide available on the design and customization of an effective database program, it also takes the reader, step-by-step, through the process of interpreting data and implementing it to improve service quality and customer responses. Topics include: establishing realistic goals for a database marketing system; lead generation marketing; building a database marketing team; mainframes versus decentralized database system; estimating revenues and costs.

"Arthur Hughes is one of the pioneers of modern database marketing. His new book, Strategic Database Marketing, Third Edition, contains the wisdom of twenty years of database marketing experience from scores of companies throughout the US. I can heartily endorse Arthur's book for anyone who wants to know the state of the art in database marketing today."
--Lester Wunderman, Chairman and Founder, Wunderman Advertising.

"Arthur Hughes has written an encyclopedic overview of database marketing concepts and applications. This is the book you want your whole team to read and heed ... and your competitors to never discover."
--Bill Williams, President and CEO, Harry and David

"Strategic Database Marketing is required reading for all of our employees. From Arthur's book, we've learned how to evaluate customers and how to communicate with them in a way that is relevant to their specific needs. Arthur's book compels people to act, and to become better marketers."
--Chris Baggott, Cofounder and CMO, ExactTarget

Techniques for linking database marketing with Internet technologies--for lifetime customer retention and repeat sales

Your customers want to hear from you, but not with unfocused and misdirected sales pitches. They want meaningful, personalized communications offering products and services that will provide them with the greatest value.

Strategic Database Marketing, Third Edition, shows you how to integrate the customer information you currently have with powerful Web-based tools to communicate more effectively with your most valued customers and create an invincible marketing machine. This marketing classic, instrumental in launching and shaping the database marketing industry, is now comprehensively revised and updated to include:

• New details on fast-changing Web technologies and marketing
• Entirely new chapters on customer segmentation, modeling and acquisition
• Dozens of new case studies
• In-depth discussion of prospect databases

The personal customer information stored in your company's database files provides you with a unique and valuable competitive advantage. But are you using that information productively? Is your data difficult if not impossible for frontline employees to access when they need it?

Strategic Database Marketing, Third Edition, details the latest web-focused strategies for unleashing the power in your company's customer database and turning it into a sales-building weapon. Using dozens of updated case studies from Travelers Insurance, Hallmark, Caterpillar, and other global marketers, database marketing pioneer Arthur Hughes hones the concepts and hands-on strategies in his bestselling guide to provide you with:

• A step-by-step primer for computing Lifetime Value (LTV) for each of your customers, with specific techniques for making LTV an integral part of your strategic planning
• Methods for using Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) analysis to gain invaluable behavioral insights about your customers
• Guidelines for establishing a risk revenue matrix for identifying valuable customers in danger of leaving
• Control group strategies to ensure that your marketing initiatives are working to provide significant Return on Investment (ROI)
• Predictive modeling techniques that can show you which customers or prospects are most likely to be loyal buyers
• Customer acquisition methods using direct mail, reverse telephone number appends, and more
• Strategies for making your Web site as useful and informative as a live operator by replacing costly call center inquiries with virtually free Web inquiries
• Automated trawling techniques that instantly communicate with customers regarding unique events, from birthdays and anniversaries to unusually large transactions
• Proven database marketing methods retailers can implement to gain advantage from the Internet

The Internet has impacted virtually every aspect of the global business arena, none more than marketing and customer communications. Strategic Database Marketing reveals what frontline marketers are doing to seamlessly integrate Web technologies into their database marketing programs, and what you can do starting now to provide your best customers with recognition, service, friendship, and information--for which they will reward you with loyalty, reduced attrition, and dramatically improved sales and profits.