Instituting a program of personal, hand-signed notes that coincide with birthdays or special events addressed to customer's significant other that offer gift ideas, can have surprising results.

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Step 4: Track results of your database marketing efforts. _____________________________________________________

By knowing who you sent offers to and who responded will help you identify your best customers, allow you to more effectively allocate your marketing dollars, and help you tweak your marketing pieces to get higher response rates.

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What Information Do I Collect? ________________________________

It’s important to determine in advance type of information to collect. To do this, make a list of common special offers you might be presenting to your customer.

For instance, if you sold a product in health industry and many of your customers have lower back problems you could joint venture with other businesses to develop special promotions on products that help to relieve lower back pain.

To capture fact that your customer experiences lower back pain, simply place a check box on your form that says, "Do you experience lower back pain?"

If your customer has small children, consider presenting follow-up offers for products targeted for small children.

Imagine being a consumer and receiving a letter from your business with an enclosed birthday card for little Joey who just turned eight years old and a discount offer for a basketball hoop or other relevant products. You think to yourself, "What a great gift. Joey would love that!" This is power of database marketing.

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Collecting Accurate and Consistent Information ________________________________________________

Database marketing all starts at point of sale. Without accurate, complete, and consistent data this type of pinpoint target marketing can’t be done.

To ensure that your information is accurate and consistent, help your customers fill out data collection form and review each information form for completeness.

You might experience a hesitancy from your customer to give out all their personal information, similar to how I felt at Radio Shack.

However, after explaining that information will only be used to send out special offers during important events, is completely confidential, and will not be shared with anybody else, you’ll find that most of your customers won’t have any problem giving out their personal information.

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Cost Effective Loyal Customers ________________________________

Marketing to your current customers is one of most effective and cost-efficient strategies you can do to reduce your marketing costs, enhance your customer / retailer relationships, and produce long-term loyal customers who, over a period of months or years, become your biggest source of referrals.

According to Quantum Physics, focusing actually causes changes in energy fields that automatically produce a physical change in your surroundings.

Instead of focusing on problem, you need to focus on solution—the outcome that you desire. Unfortunately 95% percent of people focus on what they fear, instead of what they want out of life.

It’s kind of like driving down road and seeing a pothole. If you focus intently on staring at pothole, intending to miss it, what happens? Of course! You run smack dab into it.

It’s same in all areas of life. When you focus on your fears, you make them reality.

Do you worry about spending money educating yourself to reach your goals? Are you afraid that you may be throwing away money that you may never see again? Are you operating in a spirit of fear?

As Sir Winston Churchill is so often quoted, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This statement hits nail on head. It literally is 100 percent true.

Focus instead on realizing that you must have proper tools and education to succeed.

You wouldn’t try to build a house without a good set of tools and some construction knowledge.

Focus on doing exactly what it takes to get outcome you want.

With that in mind, key to success is more you focus on what you want, more your desires will manifest themselves in your life.