Building Database and Strong Partnerships
Why You Should Build Your Database and Marketing Partnerships
Recently , I've been reviewing my book, More Bums on Seats , which was published 10 years ago. When I think back on the lessons I wrote at the time, I can say that they are still very relevant now.
One of the things we learned very early in our first business, called Life Tools, was the power of owning a customer database . We knew nothing about business, and I can't claim some kind of instant genius idea that happened to me. I can't remember why we collected a database. It just seemed like a sensible thing to do while we were at the Mind, Body, and Spirit Festival.
We decided to have a prize draw for one of the most expensive products that we were selling at the festival. Going back 25 years ago, this product was worth around $500. In today's terms, maybe it isn't that expensive, but it was 25 years ago. So we were willing to give that away to somebody who would win this competition.
We were at the festival for four days, on our feet, talking to people and encouraging them to try, and hopefully buy our products. After the successful event, we collected a database of around 500 people . We made the draw, and we contacted the person who won.
Obviously, there were hundreds of people who didn't win the raffle. At that point, I wrote a sales letter to the database that we gathered from the festival . Since emails, social media, and the internet were nonexistent at that time, everything was done by writing hard-copy sales letters and sending them out directly. The sales letter explained that the recipient was a runner up and had ‘won’ a voucher entitling them to $50 off the full price of the product!"
At the event itself, we sold about 13 of these products. From the sales letter afterward, we sold another 13 or 14 of these products. It dawned on me that attending events or expos is good because you get to meet and talk to people. You also get to realize what people respond to versus don't. However, running a booth for four straight days was exhausting and expensive and we’d only made a little bit of money after four days of solid work.
By sending out the sales letter, we made a decent margin and sold the same amount. The amount of work that went into writing and sending out the letter was probably a tenth of the work that we put into running the expo. So what I learned from that was I could make the same number of sales with a tenth of the work.
While expos are good for your business, the only reason I would go to an expo now is to gather a list because collecting a list is so important .
In the next five years, I worked on growing that list, whether through advertising, attending events, or negotiating with partnerships where people were selling similar or different things but to the same audience. I did all of that. And very quickly, we had around 20,000 people's names, addresses and phone numbers .
Nowadays, we've taken exactly that same strategy into work with what we do with restaurants and other businesses. We coach all of our clients to collect data from as many sources as possible and do regular marketing to that list. As of today, we manage about 1.3 million people’s data on behalf of our clients .
We have 25 years of experience in growing databases and making sales to those lists. Additionally, we also know how to create partnerships where people will share their lists with you. So if you are interested in knowing how to do this yourself or having it done for you contact us through the website.
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If you're interested in working with us, contact us by clicking on the button below. I look forward to having a chat with you and we’ll help you grow your database.
