Often times, an organization may have a comprehensive contact database but aren’t fully leveraging the value of it. The following tips have helped many of our customers create a more effective database marketing program that enhances existing relationships and grows website information banks:

Give your visitors more than one communication option to sign up to – offer newsletters for different interest groups, run a monthly contest, and offer a library of white papers.

Be specific about what they can expect for signing up – are you offering industry news, coupons, or special promotions?

Tell them how often they can expect to hear from you – will you send it out weekly, monthly, or quarterly? Adhere to the schedule once it has been set up.

Provide a preview of what they are signing up for – offer an example of your newsletter on the subscribe page.

Deal with privacy and unsubscribe fears upfront – be clear on your privacy policy and include a clear unsubscribe footer on all newsletters.

Make it easy to sign up – keep the information you collect to a minimum, or use a single field newsletter subscription box.

Promote sign-up options on every page of your site – link your subscribe page to a button , or embed a subscribe box on every page.

Give something of genuine value to entice them to give you permission to email them – things like exclusive offers, deals, or exclusive pre-sales to newsletter subscribers will help.

Ensure the database tool powering your site is robust and easy to query – you must be able to sort and filter your contacts properly to fully utilize the database.

Make your customers aware of your online sign-up when you are dealing with them face to face – add a link to your business cards, or collect their contact info and sign them up later.

Database marketing can deliver outstanding returns, so start using your website to build your business today! Clickspace makes it easy and cost-effective for all businesses, big or small, to start their own contact database. Click here to learn more about our DriveIt suite of marketing software.

We hope you have found these tips useful and will soon be reaping the rewards of an improved relationship with your customers. Do you have any success stories or unique database marketing experience that you can share with our readers? Please be sure to leave us a note below.

By tracking your Ecommerce sales with Google Analytics you are able to analyze a number of things – including total revenue, individual products sold, and your overall rate of conversion. You’re also able to tell how many visits or days it took your customer before finally deciding to place an order. A list of referring websites and the total revenue from those sites is also available, which is useful when evaluating online advertising efforts.

If you’re a current DriveIt client and you’d like to setup tracking of your sales with Google Analytics please contact us for more information.

A Facebook Page is like a profile for your company. Instead of creating a group (which is limited to only 5,000 members) a Page works just like your personal profile does – with the ability to add applications, send messages, and have as many fans as you wish. It creates a formal web presense on Facebook that’s visible to search engines, and can help you reach your customers in new ways. Through your page you can create events, start a discussion, import notes from your blog and even post polls and video content for your fans to view.

Pages also helps you gather demographics about your fans through its Insights area. You can view data on who your fans are, their gender, age range and what they are doing the most on your page. With the ability to add static FBML content box (Facebook Markup Language) you can also integrate custom HTML to display your latest promotions or other content from your website.

So with more than 10.6 Million users in Canada using Facebook (the largest userbase outside of the USA) why not create one?