Rather than post Part 2 of my blog about using customer touch points today, Halloween seems the perfect day to post a lucky 7 treats for improving your data quality and hopefully response rates to your marketing efforts. Part 2 of Touch Points will be posted next Tuesday.

While some of these seem logical, I am consistently amazed that clients seem to be more focused on emailing to the same lists over an over, or growing their database size, rather than also mine customers they already have.

1. Do some targeted email efforts to un-engaged past customers on your database, to see if there is still a person attached to that email addresses. A simple click, a profile update, a contest are all efforts you can try, to see if people will re-engage.
2. How many data silos do you have? Perhaps you incorporate them into one central database, or at least scrub them electronically to see what information you can add to your more used lists.
3. Test your message, your format, your subject line, your colors used.
4. On a upcoming offer, ask an additional non-required demographic question such as areas of interest at work, titles, hobbies. You might be surprised what people will tell you that you can use to develop new products, focus marketing to current ones.
5. Tag and track the type of information that people are clicking on your website.
6. Append missing demographics that sale is consistently asking for, from an outside source: Dun & Bradstreet, Fortune information, Hoovers, there are MANY list sources you can use.
7. Hone your social media skills—which ones work best for your brands?

Stick one of more of these ideas into your bag of marketing tricks, to implement this year. No calories in any of them—and varying costs, which can result in a few new customers or improved sales.

The journey continues.

C