Ways to Acquire Customer Information
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
If you already have a retail store, you have many opportunities to connect with existing and potential customers and acquire their information for marketing. When you expand this storefront to the Internet, your opportunities mount even further. Gathering customer information allows you to continually reach your customers and prospects, either through online or offline marketing campaigns.
Depending on your business, you may want to send regular newsletters, monthly email specials, calendar events, postcards, or catalogs to current and potential customers. The more information you collect about each patron, the greater impact your marketing efforts can make, the stronger understanding you’ll have about your customers, and the better you’ll be able to serve them.
Before you begin building a database of existing and potential customers, make sure that you understand the basics behind protecting and ensuring their privacy. Businesses need to build customer trust and protect the data they’ve gathered. Make sure your new contacts are fully aware of the ways you’ll use their data, regardless of how you collect their information. The best way to do this is by instituting a “privacy policy.”
A privacy policy simply explains to your database what you’ll do with their personal information. Depending on your budget, you can either use a free policy wizard to create a basic privacy policy for you, like the one at p3pwiz.com, or you can hire a copywriter or an attorney to develop a more complex policy for you, but this is usually only necessary for very large corporations that sell products online, offer password-restricted user functions, or deliver other advanced features on their website.
Some questions to address when creating your Privacy Policy include:
* Do you, or will you ever share or sell customer information with outside parties?
* If you do sell their information, who will you sell it to and what will they use it for - contests, advertising, simple sales, or order processing?
* If you use customer information to send promotions out, how frequently can they expect these?
* What should your customers do if they want to opt-out from mailings in the future?
Sphere: Related Content
