Customer Database is…

An essential tool for collecting and sorting customer information for sales and marketing
functions. A Customer Database is a resource for customer profiling, identifying MVC's,
target marketing, and territory assignment and sales coverage. It is a planning tool to
manage Niche Marketing for Profit. The time and money you spend developing a customer
database is repaid many times over.

Benefits of Developing a Customer Database

 Gives you a competitive advantage

 Identifies potential markets and customers
 Generates targeted mailings 
 Monitors sales and revenue performance by customer and product
 Spots buying trends
 Shows sales increases/decreases by customer and product
 Helps manage your marketing plan

How can MMEC help me develop a Customer Database for Niche Marketing?
We (MMEC and marketing consultants trained in Targeting Niche Marketing for Profit) start
by helping you build a simple database that is easily changed and understood, in a format
that is useful for sales and marketing functions. We ensure the information is easily
accessed, manipulated, and sorted. Depending on your needs and requirements, we
customize databases ranging from basic to comprehensive. We often recommend off-the-
shelf databases that can be tailored for your specific uses. After you are comfortable with
the simple database and realize the benefits, we can help you add a wealth of information
to the customer database to make it an even more comprehensive and powerful marketing
tool. We don't just tell you what you should do; we help you do it!

Collection of records of consumer purchasing patterns and histories stored in a computer system and organized so that it
can be retrieved quickly to provide information for a variety of uses. Information contained in a customer database is
obtained from store receipts, credit card purchases, mail-order requests, information inquiries, and other sources
demonstrating customer preferences or predisposition to purchasing a product. Customer databases are useful to
marketers when planning promotions for new products, repeat sales, or cross-selling techniques.

A customer database can be defined as an organised collection of records (customer data)

which are systematically stored in such a way that a computer programme can interrogate /
consult it to answer queries.
Each record in the customer database is usually organised as a set of data elements (facts) in
order for better retrieval and sorting. When ‘queried’, the items (information) retrieved can be
used to make informed decisions that might otherwise be impossible, or more difficult, to make.
This information can also be called ‘customer insight’.
To manage and query a customer database, an application called a database management
system (DBMS) is used.
A customer database will have a structural description of the type of facts (data) held in that
database, called a ‘schema’. A schema describes the data held in the customer database, and the
relationship between the different data. Schemas (or customer database structures) can be
organised in many different ways. There are a number of different ways of organising a schema
– these are known as database models (or data models). The most common model in use today
is the ‘relational model’ (hence the term ‘relational customer database’), which means that all
data / information is represented in the form of multiple related tables each table consisting of
rows and columns. This model represents relationships by the use of values common to more
than one table.
The flexibility of relational customer databases allows programmers to write queries that were
not anticipated by the original customer database designers. As a result, relational customer
databases can be used by multiple applications in ways the original designers did not foresee,
which is especially important for customer databases that might be used over long periods of
time. This has made the concept and implementation of relational customer databases very
popular with businesses across all sectors.

Database marketing is a form of direct marketing using databases of customers or

potential customers to generate personalized communications in order to promote a product
or service for marketingpurposes. The method of communication can be any addressable
medium, as in direct marketing.

The distinction between direct and database marketing stems primarily from the attention
paid to the analysis of data. Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical
techniques to develop models of customer behavior, which are then used to select
customers for communications. As a consequence, database marketers also tend to be
heavy users of data warehouses, because having a greater amount of data about customers
increases the likelihood that a more accurate model can be built.

There are two main types of marketing databases, 1) Consumer databases, and 2) business
databases. Consumer databases are primarily geared towards companies that sell to
consumers, often abbreviated as B2C or BtoC. Business marketing databases are often
much more advanced in the information that they can provide. This is mainly due to the fact
that business databases aren't restricted by the same privacy laws as consumer databases.

The "database" is usually name, address, and transaction history details from internal sales
or delivery systems, or a bought-in compiled "list" from another organization, which has
captured that information from its customers. Typical sources of compiled lists are charity
donation forms, application forms for any free product or contest, product warranty cards,
subscription forms, and credit application forms.

The communications generated by database marketing may be described as junk

mail or spam, if it is unwanted by the addressee. Direct and database marketing
organizations, on the other hand, argue that a targeted letter or e-mail to a customer, who
wants to be contacted about offerings that may interest the customer, benefits both the
customer and the marketer.

Some countries and some organizations insist that individuals are able to prevent entry to
or delete their name and address details from database marketing lists.

DATA WAREHOUSE

Data Warehouse Intelligence is a general term to describe a system used in an organization to collect

data, most of which are transactional data, such as purchase records and etc., from one or more data

sources, such as the database of a transactional system, into a central data location, the Data

Warehouse, and later report those data, generally in an aggregated way, to business users in the

organization. This system generally consists of an ETL tool, a Database, a Reporting tool and other

facilitating tools, such as a Data Modeling tool.

A data warehouse (DW) is a database used for reporting. The data is offloaded from the operational

systems for reporting. The data may pass through an operational data store for additional operations

before it is used in the DW for reporting.

A data warehouse maintains its functions in three layers: staging, integration, and access. Staging is

used to store raw data for use by developers (analysis and support). The integration layer is used to

integrate data and to have a level of abstraction from users. The access layer is for getting data out

for users.

This definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. The main source of the data is cleaned,

transformed, catalogued and made available for use by managers and other business professionals

for data mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support (Marakas & OBrien

2009). However, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data, and to

manage the data dictionary are also considered essential components of a data warehousing system.

Many references to data warehousing use this broader context. Thus, an expanded definition for data

warehousing includes business intelligence tools, tools to extract, transform and load data into the

repository, and tools to manage and retrieve metadata.

data warehouse

A data warehouse is the main repository of an organization's historical data, its corporate
memory. It contains the raw material for management's decision support system. The
critical factor leading to the use of a data warehouse is that a data analyst can perform
complex queries and analysis, such as data mining, on the information without slowing
down the operational systems.

Data mining, a branch of computer science [1] and artificial intelligence [2], is the process of

extracting patterns from data. Data mining is seen as an increasingly important tool by
modern business to transform data into business intelligence giving an informational
advantage. It is currently used in a wide range of profiling practices, such
as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery.

The related terms data dredging, data fishing and data snooping refer to the use of data

mining techniques to sample portions of the larger population data set that are (or may be)
too small for reliable statistical inferences to be made about the validity of any patterns
discovered (see also data-snooping bias). These techniques can, however, be used in the
creation of new hypotheses to test against the larger data populations.

data mining

The development of computational algorithms for the identification or extraction of structure

from data. This is done in order to help reduce, model, understand, or analyze the data.
Tasks supported by data mining include prediction, segmentation, dependency modeling,
summarization, and change and deviation detection. Database systems have brought digital
data capture and storage to the mainstream of data processing, leading to the creation of
large data warehouses