The business environment and increased competitive pressures have caused many corporations to shift to a more targeted marketing communications. Today, we are competing in a worldwide basis and targeting and communicating effectively is even more critical.

Database marketing started late in 1960s with the Dinner’s Club Card. Diner’s Club had few hundred thousand customers to whom they promoted restaurants that accepted the credit card. The most successful marketers on the Internet today are database marketers. Dell Computer and Lands’ End are great examples what database marketing can do.

Database marketers can ... 

• Send targeted promotions to any segment of their customer and prospect lists
• Measure the value of their individual customers
• Track promotional efforts, measure responses, purchases, and the return on investment for every dollar spent on their promotional efforts.

Database marketing has long been in the domain of the Fortune 500, companies that spend millions of dollars on their marketing efforts. Lower cost computers and technology has made DMB the domain of smaller organizations with smaller budgets.

What Is Database Marketing?

Database marketing is the technique of gathering all the information available about your customers, leads, and prospects into a central database to drive all your marketing efforts. This information can be used at both the strategic and tactical levels to drive targeted marketing efforts.

As databases become more sophisticated people the concept of Customer Relationship Marketing evolved. This concept attempted to match customers’ past purchase behaviors with geo-demographics and advanced math to predict future behavior.  CRM took off rapidly in 2000. 

Database Marketing Terms

The following is a list of terms commonly used in database marketing. Clicking on the link will bring you to the definition of the term (and related terms) in the Dictionary of Marketing Terms:

• Appended
• ASCII
• Cleaning Names
• CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing)
• Database
• Database Marketing
• De-Dupe
• Merge/Purge
• NCOA
• Nth Name
• Relational Database
• RFM
• SQL