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MM Memo Info for Mailing List

To:Business Owner

From:Manager Marketing and Sales

Subject:Information for Mailing list

I have just returned from a Craft and Arty Stuff Conference.

At the conference they talked about direct marketing and the power of marketing to customers based on their preferences – it seems there is a lot of interest in collecting information, then using it to maximize our sales potential.

There was an interesting segment on websites where they promoted capturing customer details on line. Then automatically mailing directly to the customer- things in which we believe they would be interested. There was a discussion on selling the right stuff to the right people.

When we develop our website we should consider providing a direct mailer facility for our customers.

When customers visit our website we should let them give us information – we should collect:

  • First name
  • Last name
  • Address
  • Phone
  • Mobile phone
  • email
  • Firm they work for
  • Number of staff
  • Position in firm
  • Age
  • Income
  • Date of birth
  • Anniversary date
  • Spouse’s name
  • Favorite colours

I am told that date of birth, favorite colour and spouse’s name is really valuable to collect – so we should use this as a means of identifying or authenticating the customer. We could use this instead of a password.

I have been told that you can use these tricky things called cookies to track where the customer has gone and what they pages they have visited. Then you can use the information stored in cookies to email opportunities to the customer. The customers think they are getting a great bargain – but really you just know what they visited what they are interested in - and they don’t know you know.

Here’s some examples

Example 1

Customer visits the voting page and provides their opinion on a new product. If it is good – 2 weeks later you send them an email telling them it is on special!

Note: you don’t tell them you are doing this – you tell them you are collecting votes to identify future product trends.

Example 2

Customer nominates that their password or authentication string is an anniversary. Just before their anniversary you send an email with a special offer based on their favourite colour. And you send it with an email title “spouse name will love this”

Note: this will be a surprise because you haven’t told them you would provide special offers for their anniversary and we use their spouse name in the email title to get their attention.

Recommendation

Lets implement a mailing page on the website and make as mandatory fields as possible. We should also collect other stuff like income and colour preference. Pas words should be based on an important date.

We only need to think about cookies not implement them – but we may implement cookies much later – no need at this stage.