7 Ways To Build Your Brand’s Customer Database

No matter how great a brand’s customer database is, it dies the moment it stops growing. As consumers become more conscious of their online privacy, building a strong and accurate database is getting more difficult by the day. Afterall, how comfortable are you with sharing your cell number on the landing page of a company you aren’t super familiar with?

If your phone and email databases are starting to slump, try Fidelitas Development’s “7 Ways To Build Your Brand’s Customer Database” and put those email marketing best practices to use this year.

Contesting

Having a contest is the first strategy to come to mind for most marketing pros, but there are a lot of different ways to effectively engage your target market. One of my personal favorites is promoting a text-to-win contests over traditional media channels. There’s no better way to measure the effectiveness of your media campaigns. For more on text message marketing, check out our blog on how text message marketing fits into your 2017 marketing plan.

When it comes to email, there are several ways to host contests on social media and landing pages that will drive email sign ups. The key to success is ease of use. When a potential database member clicks to enter your contest, don’t bog them down with a long entry form. Make your landing page forms quick and to the point. Name and email (unless other details are required for the contest to work) will do just fine.

Pro Tip: Marketing leaders must be sure to include the proper verbiage in the fine print to protect themselves. It’s never a bad idea to have an attorney review contest rules and terms before taking the promotion live.

Instant Coupons

Instant coupons are another great tactic that work on both text message and email marketing campaigns. Brick and mortar retailers can support these campaigns with in-store signage promoting a discount, while many Etail Marketers have built their lists off of the ten percent off pop-up offers that are prevalent on most Ecommerce sites. Using trackable Bit.ly links allow for increased analytics on the text message and email marketing side, and marketing pros can leverage similar promo codes to drive digital sales with their text message databases.

“First Look” Exclusives

Marketing leaders often fail to take advantage of an asset they already have on-hand: the ability to give customers sneak peaks and early access to sales flyers, product releases, event ticket pre-sales, and other content that brands’ most passionate customers won’t hesitate to trade their contact information for. These exclusive emails tend to have the highest open and click-through rates and should be used often when trying to build a customer database.

Pro Tip: Marketing leaders must ensure that their brands’ employees are encouraged to secure customer data with these promotions, and should be willing to use part of the overall marketing budget to provide an incentive for the brick-and-mortar staff to mention these opportunities to anyone that walks in the door.

Bonus / Gated Content

The process of “gating” content simply means requiring customers to submit their contact information before giving them the content for “free”- that contact information is the price of admission. This means that marketing leaders must put some serious time, effort and budget into creating strong bonus content in order to get any sort of ROI on the campaign. Otherwise, those landing pages will have higher bounce rates than the worst of the worst social media clickbait.

Sometimes bonus content is as simple as an extended version of a commercial that’s a favorite among a brand’s customers. Other times bonus content includes how-to-videos, exclusive interviews with industry pros and celebrities, or even exclusive discounts and sales that aren’t available to the public. Trust us, “secret sales” are one of the best ways to make sure that a brand’s promotions are anything but secret. The more exclusive the promotion feels, the more likely that promotion is to be shared across social channels.

Surveys

Some customers are never more excited than when a brand asks for their feedback. A handful of them were going to give the brand that feedback whether they want it or not, so it’s all the better for the brand to ask for it! We recommend running social ads inviting your fans to take a survey with a prize or discount incentive attached. These surveys should always require email addresses and cellphone numbers, and customers will be happy to submit them- refer to the aforementioned contesting strategy as to why.

The icing on the cake for marketing leaders is that the surveys already prequalify the customers into different marketing funnels based on the questions asked- allowing for more successful email and text message marketing campaigns in the future.

Event RSVPs

Brands and their marketing leaders should leverage any event, from sponsored cocktail mixers and concerts, to in-store demos, lunch-and-learns, and sales events, by encouraging digital RSVPs. At the very least, marketing leaders will capture a nice haul of new email addresses to place into their lead funnels. Depending on the desirability of the event and the excitement surrounding it, it’s possible to secure a lot more information than that- everything from company size to personal shopping habits and income.

“Foot In The Door” Offers

Foot in the door offers, also known as tripwires, are a great piece of low-hanging fruit to help move brands’ audiences from would-be buyers to paying customers. These offers entice future customers with significant value adds at a low cost while giving brands a chance to put their best foot forward and build relationships with their newest customers. The other nice perk of these offers is that they will, at the very least, lead to the growth of marketing leaders’ email databases. Segmenting these lists allows marketing leaders to personalize their follow up offers while adding value to the customer’s experience with the brand.

What are you doing to grow your marketing databases? How are you segmenting your lists? We’d love to hear from you! Let us know what you’re up to!