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Executive Summary

Introduction

Gartner Group & Research

Marketing databases

Data warehousing

Data management

Conclusion

Database marketing is a form of direct marketing using databases of customers or potential customers
to generate personalized communications in order to promote a product or service
for marketingpurposes. The method of communication can be any addressable medium, as in direct
marketing.

The distinction between direct and database marketing stems primarily from the attention paid to the
analysis of data. Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical techniques to develop models of
customer behavior, which are then used to select customers for communications. As a consequence,
database marketers also tend to be heavy users of data warehouses, because having a greater amount
of data about customers increases the likelihood that a more accurate model can be built.

There are two main types of marketing databases, 1) Consumer databases, and 2) business databases.
Consumer databases are primarily geared towards companies that sell to consumers, often abbreviated
as B2C or BtoC. Business marketing databases are often much more advanced in the information that
they can provide. This is mainly due to the fact that business databases aren't restricted by the same
privacy laws as consumer databases.

The "database" is usually name, address, and transaction history details from internal sales or delivery
systems, or a bought-in compiled "list" from another organization, which has captured that information
from its customers. Typical sources of compiled lists are charity donation forms, application forms for any
free product or contest, product warranty cards, subscription forms, and credit application forms.
The communications generated by database marketing may be described as junk mail or spam, if it is
unwanted by the addressee. Direct and database marketing organizations, on the other hand, argue that
a targeted letter or e-mail to a customer, who wants to be contacted about offerings that may interest the
customer, benefits both the customer and the marketer.

Some countries and some organizations insist that individuals are able to prevent entry to or delete their
name and address details from database marketing lists.

The growth of database marketing is driven by a number of environmental issues. Fletcher, Wheeler and
[4]
Wright (1991) classified these issues into four main categories: (1) changing role of direct marketing;
(2) changing cost structures; (3) changing technology; and (4) changing market conditions.

DRIVER #1: THE CHANGING ROLE OF DIRECT MARKETING

* The move to relationship marketing for competitive advantage.

* The decline in the effectiveness of traditional media.
* The overcrowding and myopia of existing sales channels.

DRIVER #2: CHANGING COST STRUCTURES

* The decline in electronic processing costs.

* The increase in marketing costs.

DRIVER #3: CHANGING TECHNOLOGY

* The advent of new methods of shopping and paying.

* The development of economical methods for differentiating customer communication.

DRIVER #4: CHANGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

* The desire to measure the impact of marketing efforts.

* The fragmentation of consumer and business markets.

Shaw and Stone (1988) noted that companies go through evolutionary phases in the developing their
database marketing systems. They identify the four phases of database development as:

1. mystery lists;
2. buyer databases;
3. coordinated customer communication; and
4. integrated marketing.
Data Center Modernization and Consolidation Key

Initiative Overview

Mike Chuba

IT leaders need to assess organizational needs, economic trends and technology drivers when making
decisions about how to modernize and/or consolidate data center infrastructure. This overview points
to research that can help them make enlightened choices.

ANALYSIS

Data center modernization and consolidation involves customizing data center strategies according to
business plans, regulatory requirements, skills availability and rapidly changing technologies.

Enterprises need to control costs while staying competitive, and data center modernization and
consolidation projects offer the opportunity to do both. Gartner research provides invaluable advice
about how to plan and implement a modernization and consolidation project, whether it involves
building and populating a new data center, modernizing an existing one, or conducting a server
consolidation project within an existing data center. We address such issues as spatial constraints,
legacy technologies, legal requirements for storage and rising energy costs. Clients that follow our
advice typically save more than 10% of their annual operational costs. We also help clients with
procurement, contract review and discount evaluation, activities that also result in cost savings.

Consider These Factors to Determine Your Readiness

Enterprises planning to embark on data center consolidation and/or modernization projects should
consider these typical hurdles and discern those that may present significant challenges.

These include:

Assess infrastructure before starting any modernization project.

Encourage a top-down focus of relationships among IT infrastructure, operations, and

applicationdevelopment and business units. Address internal political issues that can derail plans.

Determine where savings in server, storage and network infrastructure are achievable.

Decide best metrics and software tools for measuring data center energy efficiency.
Determine the number and location of data centers, and whether they should be standalone, colocated
or outsourced. Learn how to consolidate infrastructure and operations within a data center or set of
data centers.

Examine how a data center consolidation and modernization project will affect IT platforms and
systems. Consider how to handle legacy infrastructures.

Conduct Your Data Center Consolidation/Modernization Project in Five Phases

Gartner recommends that IT leaders implement these major phases in their data center modernization
and consolidation projects (these phases may vary, depending on your organization and the extent of
the deployment):

Strategize and Plan: Determine achievable cost savings and energy efficiency.

Consider aspects such as the effects of the project on other parts of the IT infrastructure. Present a
business case based on these metrics and return on investment.

Architect Solution: Include the necessary number of data centers, their locations and configurations.
Decide whether they should be colocated or outsourced. Incorporate changes in business continuity
plans. Develop an overall cloud-computing strategy for your organization.

Select Solution: Use Gartner research to help you select and implement technologies, products and
services to gain energy efficiency, increase agility and enhance availability. Differentiate between "real"
green IT projects and industry hype.

Build: Meet immediate needs, rather than building for long-term growth. Focus on design efficiency and
an incremental build-out methodology. Factor in density zones and multitiered designs. Integrate legacy
hardware with new innovations. Strive for optimal costs.

Operate and Evolve: Monitor energy and operational efficiency. Make changes according to industry
requirements and enterprise needs. Establish processes for ongoing server consolidation and disciplines
for implementation of virtual servers to prevent virtual server sprawl

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One of the biggest challenges any sales enterprise faces is in finding potential customers for
their products. Billions are spent each year in product marketing, though much of this
expenditure is wasted through the use of inaccurate data and bad marketing decisions

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In an effort to more effectively target potential customers, many enterprises use database
marketing to build models of their target demographic group, track down these groups and
focus their advertising budgets on them in the hope that it will result in an improved return
on investment (ROI) from their advertising spend.

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At its most basic level, database marketing is the analysis of databases holding information
about previous or potential customers. These databases usually consist of basic personal
details of customers along with details of their past transactions. The information is either
gathered from internal sales data or bought in from other organisations.

!
 " 
!#"

Consumer information is gathered by enterprises

in a number of ways, many of which consumers
remain oblivious to (see CRM). These methods
can range from requesting that the consumer fill
in and return a warranty card to running
promotional contests and sweepstakes.

Ideally, enterprises prefer to gather as much

information as possible about potential
customers, so they will employ any available
methods to milk consumers for personal data.
The more information contained within a database, the more accurate the results of its
analysis.

!
 !
!#!

B2B data is usually much more limited than consumer information, but it can also be easier
to procure. Enterprises hoping to target businesses can simply get in touch personally or
gather publicly available information about them. However, since B2B databases will usually
only contain a few hundred or thousand pieces of information at most (compared to
potentially millions of pieces in a consumer database) it is more difficult to build a targeted
marketing plan.

°c$

Once a consumer or business database has been compiled it can then be broken down and
analysed to produce valuable marketing information. If the database is extremely limited
this analysis can be performed manually, but most consumer databases will contain so
much data that specialised software tools are necessary to generate useful results.

Predictive analytics software allows data analysers to construct high quality predictive
models of customer behaviour. By studying the past purchases of consumers it can be
possible to predict broad trends in their purchasing habits, resulting in a somewhat accurate
prediction of their future purchasing (though, of course, it is impossible to make 100%
accurate predictions in this area).
Using these trends it is possible to further refine the information by grouping individuals
according to any other personal data held on file about them (such as income, age, gender,
etc.). This grouping results in a targeted mailing list of potential customers, each of whom
share a set of desired characteristics.

 


Once the raw data has been analysed and a mailing list produced there is simply the matter
of contacting the potential customers with targeted advertising.

Traditionally, database marketing results in the mailing of advertisements (what many

people would call µjunk mail¶). The development of technology, however, has enabled
enterprises to contact potential customers much more quickly than through the mail.

While a great many enterprises still use the postal service to generate leads, modern
marketing methods also involve the use of e-mail and SMS messages to potential
customers. As well as being less expensive than traditional mail shots, electronic messages
come with the additional benefit that recipients can respond instantly, either by following a
link in an email or opting-in through an SMS orasking for a callback.

%


 


The development of the Internet has offered enterprises a highly effective way to gather
customer information. Internet users are now perfectly comfortable with
completing electronic forms for everything from online purchasing to setting up e-mail
accounts, so the amount of consumer information available has increased greatly.

At present, we are seeing the development of a new form of database advertising. Online
advertisers now use surfing habits as a method of directing advertising towards Internet
users. Search engines such as Google serve ads according to users' keyword searches, while
vendors such as Amazon use details of previous transactions to build a list of user-targeted
recommendations. We can expect this trend to continue until all online activities are tracked
for marketing purposes.
A company¶s marketing database is the cornerstone of every initiative they undertake. But to be effective, the database must
provide the ability to manage, analyze and visualize the campaigns with results that are straightforward and agile.

Acxiom delivers the simple, flexible, marketing-database solutions you need to manage and monitor customer acquisition
efforts and to retain, manage and grow existing customer relationships.

pe can help you:

ë Improve marketing decision timeliness and quality

ë Enhance marketing productivity and operational efficiency
ë Dramatically improve prospect marketing, reducing waste and increasing return on investment
ë Improve cross-sell and up-sell efforts by enriching existing data
ë Bolster customer retention by driving growth, loyalty and customer satisfaction with marketing offers and customer-
value recognition across all touch points.

International consumer electronics company case study

 A marketing database is an important asset to have in any marketers' toolkit. With a robust solution in place you can
gather detailed customer insight to enable you to deliver more targeted marketing campaigns.
dbg create and deliver scalable marketing database solutions to help you manage the customer journey and drive
profitable customer relationships. Our database marketing solutions integrate marketing data from multiple channels
including SMS, email, direct marketing, call centre and web.
From there you have the ability to manage, analyse, automate and visualise campaign activity to develop a more
customer centric approach and enable multichannel marketing.
* Easy access for users to view, extract and manipulate data directly from a desktop
* Incorporate best practice data quality management processes
* Controlled access depending users' needs and rights
* Integrate with a range of marketing tools to enable you to clean, analyse and enhance customer data
* Easy to use, real time data updates
* Marketing campaign automation based on behaviours and rules
We provide a range of marketing services, tools and applications to enable you to access to your marketing
database, conduct real time queries and analysis, execute marketing campaigns and view detailed business
intelligence reports.

Data integration is a complex task and is a big challenge for most organisations. dbg operates a suite of automated
data loading routines to bring together data from disparate sources to integrate data that is high quality and
consistent. Using an extract, transform and load (ETL) approach data can be migrated and integrated using both
batch and real-time procedures.
 The transform phase manipulates the data, applying rules so that it meets the requirements of the database from
both a technical and information perspective. Data is then cleansed, validated standardised to make sure is of high
quality and in a consistent format so you have accurate data that can be used with confidence.
The load phase takes data feeds from multiple sources both internal and external to add to either historic data or
overwrite existing data.
* Increase the quality of your business data prior to loading into your data warehouse
* Use ETL processing to unify disparate data
* Standardise formatting of data from multiple sources
* Aggregate customer information such as transaction and product information into one uniform record

Data governance and security

At dbg we understand how important your customer data is to you. That's why we ensure that our data security is of
the highest standard so you can feel confident when entrusting dbg to host and manage your customer data. Our
business processes adhere strictly to data governance to make sure we protect client data from any security
breaches and comply with data legislation.
We achieve this through a combination of effective data processing, data management and identification of any of
business risks associated to the handling of an organisations' data.
* Successfully ISO27001accredited
* Advice and expertise from our data security consultant
* Work with the DMA and IDM to ensure that best practices are followed by us and our clients
* Successfully audited in respect of data security by two of the UK's leading financial institutions

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!latform Components
Our marketing database platform is comprised of industry-leading technology and tools that have been certified to provide
high levels of security and availability. Components include:
ë Servers: Use servers designed to handle compute intensive applications that provide lightning fast query speeds and
throughput for massive storage
ë Database: Scalable platform for data integration that was built to quickly add and manage growing volumes of data and
users
ë Campaign Management: Plan, design, execute, measure and analyze multi-channel, personalized marketing campaigns
ë Statistical Analysis: Data mining and modeling to help uncover customer insights and behaviors that drive relevant
marketing communications
ë Marketing Dashboard: Enables marketers to answer market oriented questions with visualization and analytical tools rather
than relying on IT
ë Access/Reporting Tools: Provide clients remote access to all decision support tools including analytics, dashboard and
reporting
ë System Availability and Uptime: Provide complete redundancy of all systems with high guaranteed uptime and high-level
security
 Data management leaders should prepare to use cloud-based data management services with external data.
These services are becoming important for projects involving data in the cloud.

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With too much data stored in multiple systems, companies struggle to make good decisions. Different
views of critical information are presented ² allowing errors and oversights to occur.

In order to achieve a single view of your enterprise, Teradata can help you create a core of consistent
"Master Data" including customers, suppliers, accounts and other critical information. Based on the
powerful Teradata Database, we can help you maintain integrity and reliability of this shared data and
provide:
ë Streamlined processes for more agile decision making
ë Higher-quality data available faster for up-selling and cross-selling
ë ºewer risk and compliance issues

 

  



  
 
 
 
  

 
 
   
  
    



  
  
 

    

    
     
 


 
   


      

 
     
 


 
  
 
  


     
    

   

   





     
 

   


 
 


 




  
 
 
  


   

 
 

 


   

 
 

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