Strategic Database Marketing

by Arthur M. Hughes

Does the idea of net present value calculations, cluster coding, customer segmentations and complex spreadsheets turn you on? Does the thought of ruthlessly evaluating creative executions by their financial impact make you hot? Have I got a book for you.

Strategic Database Marketing is a start-to-finish, turnkey plan for implementing a database marketing program. It starts off with the assumption that mass advertising had its place when everybody needed pretty much the same stuff. Now that our needs have become fragmented and heterogeneous, we put more value on extras like recognition, service and attention. These factors make direct marketing more important than ever and, with the advent of the Web to act as medium and communication facilitator, the Golden Age of DM is at hand.

Strategic Database Marketing takes us on a crash course on calculating the financial value of customer loyalty, segmenting customers by financial contribution to the company, executing a RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis program, profiling customers for message targeting, and using the Web to mine for prospects.

Each chapter has a topline summary, some practical examples and a mini-quiz to help drive home each concept. The book pulls it all together with 180 pages of specific case study examples from various industries, topped off with a comprehensive glossary.

Strategic Database Marketing is an ambitious undertaking and it succeeds on all accounts. Any book of this scope will have to gloss over some aspects of the discipline, but Hughes keeps this to a minimum.

Here’s a test to see if you could benefit from this book. If you have programmers and finance people on your DM staff, take a pass. If you don’t, you stand to learn a great deal from this book.

BookMark Rating: 5 out of 5

Mark Szabo, an account director with Parallel Strategies in Calgary, can be reached at mark.szabo@parallel.ca. His client asked him to use the word ‘sot’ in this article, to no avail.