Direct and e-Marketing - Essay Example

One of the basic principles of the Direct Marketing is usage of a database for storing personal customer data and their purchase history. Roll notes that fundamental benefit to the business is that you are able to treat your existing customers in a different way to new prospects and thus create loyalty and maximize profitability. (Roll 2003) So the main purpose of the Direct and e-Marketing for Les Cadeaux Gourmets is to carry out an active strategy and to get more sales from the returned customers.

Customer lifetime value (also variously referred to as lifetime customer value or just lifetime value, and abbreviated CLV, LCV, or LTV) is a marketing metric that projects the value of a customer over the entire history of that customer's relationship with a company. Use of customer lifetime value as a marketing metric tends to place greater emphasis on customer service and long-term customer satisfaction, rather than on maximizing short-term sales. (Wikipedia). As Les Cadeaux Gourmets spend some money for advertisement to attract a number of customers, it would be unreasoned to loose them.

Calculating customer lifetime value will help company to know exactly how much each customer is worth in dollar terms and therefore exactly how much a marketing department should be willing to spend to acquire each customer. Thus it would be possible to range customers from the most profitable to the least ones and to concentrate the company's efforts on the most profitable customers. Use of customer lifetime value can also help to predict what customers will buy over years. For example, if Mary Smith buys a toy for a 4-year baby in 2005, she will probably order a toy for a 5-year baby in 2006. If Mr. Jones buys bath & body care pieces in March three years in a row, it's possible to make a conclusion that he makes presents for the birthday of his wife and send offering with new products to him in the next March.

So Les Cadeaux Gourmets should truck its customers' purchases and use them for planning its advertising campaign. Also the company should monitor customers' responses over time for as long as the relationship with them lasts.Geodemographic profiling uses detailed information based on postcode to match differing lifestyle profiles to the customer database. Postcodes do not resolve down to individual addresses but provide pretty good targeting.Les Cadeaux Gourmets can use geodemographic division of customers into some categories and then offer its goods to each specific category.

For example, customers ranking by nationality allows taking into consideration national traditions. Les Cadeaux Gourmets can congratulate customers from Israel with Hanukah, customers from the Middle East with Ramadan and wish other customers Merry Christmas. As a result of this national-specific proposals could be sent to each category.Use of external database with information about postcodes and countries also allows choosing seasonal proposals: in winter there is cold in the US and hot in Australia.

Les Cadeaux Gourmets can use this information for advertising of clothes and other season-specific goods.Special databases cover such categories as consumer expenditure, crime statistics, business and employment, and many others. One of the more powerful special databases is called a segmentation system. A segmentation system is useful because it allows users to add another dimension by displaying lifestyle clusters