We are living in a data saturated world. Information no longer propels a company to prominence. Instead, as Google learned long ago, the money in this Information Age is found in SORTING the good data from the bad.
This is true for every business. Your business lives or dies on the quality of the information you use. The information you hold in your smartphone may be more valuable than any product or service you sell.
My first job in high school was working as a retail cashier in a tiny, mom-and-pop toy store in a Colorado mountain town. The store was owned by a kindly grandmother and filled with simple, traditional toys like yo-yos and dollhouses. She adored children and despised computers. We wrote our receipts by hand and made change without the help of a register. Our store excelled in personal service, like free gift wrap for the treasures folks purchased.
As part of this homespun service, we offered the Birthday Dollar program, mailing a handmade postcard to each child registered. Children would provide their names, birthdays and addresses. We would write them down on index cards and file them within two glorified shoeboxes.
In 1991, when the owner decided to retire, she realized no one was willing to purchase the store and her inventory was pretty small beans. She quickly learned her greatest asset was those two shoeboxes of address cards collected from hundreds of children.
She called me in desperation because she learned if the information was in a useful computer format, there were several marketers chomping at the bit to buy it. (I might add that at the time it was long before Facebook, the internet was barely a newborn and no one had heard of a privacy policy.) I spent a week of summer vacation typing those cards into a basic spreadsheet that she sold for thousands of dollars.
Why was this information so valuable? Because it contained the CORRECT names, mailing addresses and ages of hundreds of children whose parents were largely well-to-do. These people rarely listed their phone numbers much less addresses.
The information met four keys tests:
- It was updated and accurate.
- It was well organized in a useful format.
- It was difficult to obtain elsewhere.
- It was filtered – by human eyes even – to be relevant.
Now that we are in an era of privacy policies, and internet and Facebook, it’s actually MORE important to sort, filter and update your information. Ask yourself, would your competitor slobber all over themselves for a peek at your contacts? If so, you better capitalize on it. If not, why not?
Recently I helped a marketer organize her database. She stored literally thousands of contacts, but they weren’t easily sorted. Worse, her top contacts, representing a massive portion of her sales, had out-of-date information as tough economic times had them scrambling for safe havens.
Desperate, she called me for help. My database work may have saved her job and even helped her company weather the changing tide.
I did it by:
- Organizing the information. Do you have a database filled with information but you can’t sort it into relevant piles? In her case, a client’s address may indicate where they lived, but not where they did most of their business. We created specific categories indicating regions where her contacts worked.
- Identifying the key contacts. About 200 clients represented 75 percent of this person’s business. With thousands of contacts to update, it seemed most efficient to focus my efforts. We were able to produce a list of clients who created the most transactions and who spent the most money.
- Updating the information. Once the players were narrowed, I ensured phone numbers, addresses and emails were correct using online databases, sending brief emails, or making quick calls.
- Weeding out the old stuff. Dead emails, useless addresses or long-silent contacts were eliminated. This allowed marketing to go the best prospects. It also prevented digital hording, a condition where people hold on to information “just in case” even though it may not be useful, or it’s just plain moldy.
Would you like to send marketing emails that actually reach their intended targets? Would you like to be able to email someone and not worry that the message will bounce? Would you like to be more efficient working because you aren’t hunting for accurate contact information?
If so, Avail Assistants can help. Call today and get your data mojo back.