Sources of data

Consumer data

In general, database marketers seek to have as much data available about customers and prospects as possible.

For marketing to existing customers, more sophisticated marketers often build elaborate databases of customer information. These may include a variety of data, including name and address, history of shopping and purchases, demographics, and the history of past communications to and from customers. For larger companies with millions of customers, such data warehouses can often be multiple terabytes in size.

Marketing to prospects relies extensively on third-party sources of data. In most developed countries, there are a number of providers of such data. Such data is usually restricted to name, address, and telephone, along with demographics, some supplied by consumers, and others inferred by the data compiler. Companies may also acquire prospect data directly through the use of sweepstakes, contests, on-line registrations, and other lead generation activities.

Business data

For many business-to-business marketers, the number of customers and prospects will be smaller than that of comparable business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Also, their relationships with customers will often rely on intermediaries, such as salespeople, agents, and dealers, and the number of transactions per customer may be small. As a result, business-to-business marketers may not have as much data at their disposal. One other complication is that they may have many contacts for a single organization, and determining which contact to communicate with through direct marketing may be difficult. On the other hand the database of business-to-business marketers often include data on the business activity of the respective client that can be used to segment markets, e.g. special software packages for transport companies, for lawyers etc. Customers in Business-to-business environments often tend to be loyal since they need after-sales-service for their products and appreciate information on product upgrades and service offerings.

Sources of customer data often come from the sales force employed by the company and from the service engineers. Increasingly, online interactions with customers are providing b-to-b marketers with a lower cost source of customer information.

For prospect data, businesses can purchase data from compilers of business data, as well as gather information from their direct sales efforts, on-line sites, and specialty publications.

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