By: Eric Omans

There are a lot of missed opportunities in marketing, some are uncontrollable while others are a results of poor target building and inaccurate data.  You need to have an ideal target built combined with highly accurate data if you want to hit a bullseye with your direct marketing efforts.  Whether it’s postal, telemarketing, email or social appending, accuracy is essential.  What is accuracy though?  Many people think it’s simply that John Smith is who they say he is but it actually goes much deeper.

Many clients do not segment their data enough and instead think of their client base in terms of their ideal customer.  The ideal customer is kind of like the economic theory of monopolies – it’s monolithic and focuses on marginal profit vs. marginal revenue.  In other words, many companies actually forget about the clients that build up to that ideal customer and these niche markets can actually in totality be more profitable than the ideal client that everyone else is targeting.

Take a walk in bathtub for example.  Most marketing companies focus on the elderly and senior citizens for this offer – they look solely at homeowner and age.  Now this is probably a very effective marketing method but consider the other possible buyers – people suffering from mobility ailments – also perhaps new parents as an alternative to the baby baths or a regular bathtub.  This is strictly an example but the point is that we should look at all acceptable customers and not just the ideal customer.

To further the point, segmenting the customer and then weighing those segments as a whole will help you project results and control how each variant of customer is mixed in to the overall prospecting mix.  In my experience, the more customer segmenting one can do, the more stable the marketing becomes and the more insights are gleaned from this marketing segmentation.