Strategic Database Marketing 4e: The Masterplan for Starting and Managing a Profitable, Customer-Based Marketing Program

the way to get into people’s minds, hearts and wallets is still to deliver value. And segmentation and personalization are top tactics to raise that value.

every customer should have in his or her database records three single digits: one for recency, one for frequency, and one for monetary. Every customer is either a 555, 554, 553, 552, 551, 545, 544… down to 111.

contains a search box and many links

possible for the reader to see, get information on, and place an order for any product or service offered by the retailer.

Now that your file is coded for recency, go ahead and do a promotion to your customer base. Not a special test promotion, but some communication that you had planned to do all along which asks customers to respond or make a purchase. Keep track of which quintile every customer is in and which ones respond.

you need to store one vital piece of information in every customer’s database record—the most recent purchase date.

For a business file of 20,000 records, therefore, there probably should not be more than 20 RFM cells, each one having about 1,000

To create the recency code, you sort your entire database by purchase date, with the most recent at the top. Then you divide the database into five exactly equal parts—quintiles, which you number from 5 (the most recent) down to 1 (the most ancient).

12 percent,