The good news is that any business that has collected data on their customers is sitting on their own potential gold mine. Rather than spend money trying to appeal to new prospects by running press or even online ads, you will get a much better return on investment by adding some intelligence to the way you manage your data.

Give your CRM some Data Intelligence

Most data is in such a mess it offers little insight to business owners. To turn it into a powerful tool to enable you to communicate with your customers requires a clean, intelligently organised database.

The place to start to release the value from the mountain of data you already have is to give it to an expert to wash it.

You’d be surprised how many emails and addresses are wrong, repeated or out of date. You can’t begin to measure response rates until you know the data you have is clean. It’s better to measure the response from 10,000 real customers than to assume you’re sending offers out to say 30,000 on a dirty list.

Once you have a clean list, your data then needs to be structured and categorized with the aim of maximising its usefulness for marketing purposes. There are then some things you can do straight away to not only deliver quick profits today, but also set you on the path to delivering what customers will want in the future.

Fast profits can come from testing and tailoring offers to:

• up-sell, getting customers to buy more valuable products from you
• cross-sell, encouraging them to add something else to what they usually buy from you
• increase purchase frequency, by building loyalty and giving them more reasons not to be tempted by your competitors

So get the experts in quick smart to professionally clean your data so you can secure the future of your business. Let those who continue to spend big to tempt new prospects pay the price.