Customer Insight’s the Key

For many DM executives who sell luxury goods, there’s nothing especially luxurious about their marketing strategies. They have to deal with tight budgets, database limitations, and the painful gap between the kind of marketing they’re doing and what they know they really should be doing.

According to research by Echelon Marketing Group, 85% of these DMers want to do customized one-to-one customer and prospect communications, yet only 40% are.

Luxury goods marketers understand what’s at stake. They know the trend is toward tailored, personal communications. They know building share of wallet with their best customers is essential and that doing this is impossible if they can’t get relevant messages across.

But relevance is easy when operating just a single small boutique, when a merchant knows customers by name and, for example, remembers their birthdays. It gets harder when a client database reaches 50,000 or 500,000 names. How does one understand those customers, know what’s important to them, and determine how marketing resources should be allocated?

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