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

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The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. It beats demographics every time.

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.

database, we keep track of who they are, what they buy, when they buy, and how much they spend.

Figure something valuable that you want to communicate to your less responsive customers once or twice a year

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,

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.

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.