The Big Easy

Database marketing has become socialized. It used to be the province of the biggest firms. But no more.

For one thing, software has been improved so that basic number crunching can be done by anyone with half a brain and a little patience.

Then there's the data available online, and the ever-widening array of analytic tools. And companies are wising up to the fact that non-marketing data is valuable.

“It's important that you have your complaint department information linked into the database,” says Richard N. Tooker, vice president and solutions architect at KnowledgeBase Marketing. “You don't want to solicit people who are actively involved in a fight with you.”

But you need storage and processing to handle all that data. And those things are now affordable.

“Technology has caught up with the need,” Tooker says.

Who's taking advantage of all this?

“Any company that has a file of more than 10 million customers, or possibly more than 5 million, has a reasonably sophisticated database operation,” says Don Hinman, senior vice president of product development data services for Epsilon Data Management.

But that's changing, too. Companies with less than 5 million names — as few as 500,000 — can now join the ranks of the database leaders.

That includes many business-to-business firms.

“The B-to-B market is underserved because marketing service providers make their money processing large volumes of data,” Tooker says. But technology advances now allow providers to scale applications to fit this segment.

Consumer firms face a slightly different set of challenges, according to Hinman. Their databases have to handle the two-way marketing driven by the Internet. “Consumers spend as much time searching out what they want to buy as firms spend getting stuff to them,” he says. “Good marketers will recognize they need to be as good at helping people find information about them.”

This entails using information that previously was ignored.

In the old days, a travel site would record a booking for a business trip simply as a transaction. But it might now collect other tidbits of information — for example, whether the customer also looked at vacation packages, and the exact search terms used.

Finally, Hinman says, database marketers are getting tougher on vendors.

“They are being trained by data suppliers to ask fundamental questions like, ‘How good is your data?’ and ‘How good is the coverage?’"