Success in using an outside database contractor begins with a marketer’s willingness to share information and processes. "Don’t be afraid to give full disclosure," cautioned Steve Sheltz, GE Service Management Inc.’s database manager, at a session at the National Center for Database Marketing Summer 2001 conference.
Sheltz knows of what he speaks: Under his supervision the service management division, which oversees interactions with 50 million GE appliance customers that have purchased 80 million appliances, brought in Decision Software, a Lanham, MD-based firm that earlier this year implemented a new marketing system designed from the ground up.
Sheltz sees his database as a virtual factory, one that generates 680,000 solicitations per week across e-mail, telemarketing and direct mail channels. A given program may have six efforts, or attempts, to contact a customer, and there can be up to 295 variations among its various programs during any given week. "Ninety-nine percent [of GE Service Management’s] revenue comes from these solicitations," he said. "If direct marketing stops, business shuts down."
According to Sheltz, there are many pitfalls that can lead to this. The database is a failure of users that hate it, won’t use it, or only Information Technology staff is able to use it.
Jeff Fowler, a co-presenter and president of Decision Software, noted that the program his company designed for GE Service Management hides the complexity of the database from users. Instead, it presents them with segmented data appropriate to each type of campaign, whether a renewal program, a warranty expiration notification or a cross-sale attempt.
"Marketing people don’t want to learn [database query language] SQL," said Sheltz to applause.
Sheltz also observed that often databases are structured to generate responses to specific marketing questions, such as segmenting customers by purchase data or geographic location, as opposed to being easy to manage. He offered several tips to facilitate data manipulation.
He recommends storing name and street-level address data separate from the data used in answering marketing queries. It can be linked back to the other data with unique customer ID codes. Street addresses take up a lot of space, bog down the processing time and are not used in analysis, although ZIP code and state data often are.
He also suggests that marketers not use "nulls" – such as not coding a gender-unspecific name as being neither male or female. Nulls, he said, are often overlooked when marketing queries are written. Better to leave the field blank.
Additionally, Sheltz said that overly complex source codes are difficult to use in data mining operations. A code that has a source, a year, a product and a campaign coded into a dozen-character alphanumeric string can’t be sorted or manipulated, unless each attribute is also broken out in other fields on the data entry. "You can’t build a query off a piece of a field," he said.
Finally, he cautioned companies to be ever diligent in applying standards across different databases. A marketer that uses "gender" in one set of records and "sex" in another is going to run into data migration and manipulation problems.
The National Center for Database Marketing Conference runs through Wednesday, Aug. 1.
