Chapter 10: Customer Management

Overview

Once you have a customer database, you can use it to manage your customers. What does “managing customers” mean? Marketers have found that they can

• Identify their Gold customers and work hard to keep them.

• Identify their Silver customers and persuade them to buy their way up to Gold status.

• Identify the customers who are most likely to defect and get them to change their minds.

• Reactivate lapsed customers.

• Get customers to refer others, who also become customers.

• Determine the next best product for each customer, and get customers to buy the product.

• Manage the second sale to one-time buyers.

• Manage leads to get them to become buyers.

• Develop loyalty programs to maintain customers’ interest.

Most of these things were only dreamed of in the 1980s. Some companies became proficient at customer management in the 1990s. Today, using the Internet, database marketers are learning to do all these things.