The value of your contacts database

Hopefully, at a minimum, your marketing activities will help you to increase your contacts and thus build the profile of your company. This means that over time you will end up with hundreds if not thousands of contacts in your contacts database, be that our own ConvallisCRM, an Excel spreadsheet or a shoebox full of business cards.

Once in your database the contacts immediately add value to it, if for no other reason than the time, energy and investment that was needed to get to the point where you could talk to them. But it's hard to put an actual figure on how valuable your contacts database is. Ultimately the contacts within it fall into one of two categories they are either already customers or they are potential customers, so that implies that to you at least your database is worth your companies annual turnover - think about it!

Now that we've established that your contact database is a business asset we need to think about how we might derive value from that asset, otherwise there is no point in maintaining it. Probably the most obvious use to make of it is as a marketing tool, be that sending marketing emails or letters through the post. This is where a database can really score over that shoebox (or even Excel).

Why? Well with a database you can (providing the contact management application supports it) query the database, constraining the data to allow you to target specific contacts. For instance you may want to send a mail promoting your product or service to contacts coming from a particular town or who belong to a particular industry (assuming you have captured that information). In doing so you may well manipulate the message that you want to send to them to give it more meaning to contacts working in that industry or town.

How valuable to you is the ability to target your marketing message? Or, targetting aside, send an email or letter to all your contacts? Do you still want to use that shoebox?