Target marketing

A cornerstone of business success is a thorough knowledge of your company's customer base, which means knowing about the types of people who purchase your company's products or services. Accurate and precise customer knowledge can increase a company's effectiveness—and its revenues—in many ways:

• Opening agencies in the right locations
• Evaluating the success of existing locations
• Selecting product and service offerings suited to the customers in the specific trade or market area
• Directing advertising with the right message to the right audience
• Targeting direct mail and other promotions to the most responsive recipients

Company time and money are used more effectively when accurate customer knowledge is considered before expensive business and marketing plans are launched. For these reasons, it is critical for you to understand as much as you can about your customers.

Using Tapestry segmentation data and the tools in Target Marketing, you can do the following:

• Understand the characteristics of your target customers.
• Analyze your customer's lifestyle characteristics.
• Determine where more of these types of customers live.
• Discover the untapped potential in a market.
• Develop strategies to bring customers to your products and services.

Customer profiling and analysis is a first step in acquiring valuable knowledge. The process can be equated to painting a picture: the more detail that is added to the picture, the more defined the picture becomes. Using Tapestry segmentation data, you can paint your customer profile by using data from several sources to fill in your customer picture. When the customer profiling analysis is complete, a detailed picture of your customers emerges.

To create a customer profile, you must have a table or database that contains a list of your customers and their home addresses. Customer addresses are the key that determines where they live and links them to a segment that identifies the types of people they are. Any additional information you have about your customers, such as amount spent, number of visits, or number of items purchased, is helpful and can be used to better understand and identify your best customers.