At the first marketing consulting firm I worked for the agency's lead consultant believed that the database was the lifeblood of the company. This still rings true today. The cleaner data that has gone into it over its lifetime, the better able you will be to evaluate a customer's lifetime value (CLTV) and identify potential customers that meet the same specifications. Likewise if your data migrated from one CRM system to another but only retained the past year of customer data, there will most certainly be knowledge gaps about those customers.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) databases have long been used by salesforce-driven companies to store datasets such as customer/vendor/partner contact info, purchase history, product interest, product registration, and occassionally market research data on individual customers. It has only been last five years that all this data has been coming together for small-to-medium sized businesses with emerging web platforms that enable sales professionals and marketers to better target their optimal 20% (The Pareto Principle suggests 20% of customers produce 80% of revenues).
Relationship marketing is primarily focused on customer retention and satisfaction rather than the achievement of sales quotas using sales-related promotional methods.
A themed viral marketing campaign, for example, would target existing customers and also:
- be supported by a microsite, YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitter
- encourage customers to "Like" the page, ad, or video or Tweet it to their friends
- aimed at a specific demographic segment appropriate for the offering
- could include a loyalty program to help customers save time and/or money on future purchases, e.g., season pass holders for the local symphony could be automatically subscribed to receive alerts
A campaign's success depends on how customers perceive these types of interactions with a company, its products, or its brands.
In the Entertainment Software Association's 2008 report...
Audience Sample:
1,200 nationally representative households identified as owning either or both a video game console or a personal computer used to run entertainment software
Notable Stats:
- 65% of American households play computer or video games
- 35 is the average game player age
- 26% of gamers were over the age of 50 (in 2008)
- 13 years is the average number of years adult gamers have been playing computer or video games
Best Selling Video Game Genres, 2007:
- 22.3% Action
- 17.6% Family entertainment
- 14.1% Sports
- 12.1% Shooter
Best Selling Computer Game Genres, 2007:
- 33.9% Strategy
- 18.8% Role-playing
- 14.3% Family entertainment
- 11.6% Shooter
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So, how is this relevant to marketing? CRM strategy is one aspect that comes to mind. It is a marketer's ability to define, track, and market to specific demographic sets of customers who frequently buy certain game genres. Customer relationship management, CRM, is more than just a collection of people who bought your products and services at some point. A few challenges exist for anyone entering or playing in this industry:
- to create a substantial revenue stream of recurrent purchases from new or existing customers
- to maximize ad and marketing spends in the promotion of sales
- to anticipate what customers want to play next based on purchase behavior
A good CRM system helps marketers keep the customers populations in the right buckets, and by doing so, we're able to direct appropriate messaging and content to those customers. Just having software in place isn't going to tell you how or where to market, that's what marketers are for.
