At theB2Bcompany we define a brand simply as a community of users. To us, the role of marketing is to attract new users to the community, whilst preventing existing ones from leaving. Doing this in the B2B space inevitably means having two databases and using different strategies in each to achieve these objectives. Which brings us to the point of this article – how to create these databases from scratch. In this blog let's start with the easy one first - setting up your existing customer database.
Creating a database might conjure up mental images of specialised programmes, mountains of code, layer upon layer of complexity, all housed on some mainframe computer in downtown Dubai. Nothing could be further from the truth. It really is deceptively simple.
Open up Excel and start a new spreadsheet. In the first available row type in the following headers across six columns: email address, mobile phone, first name, surname, company name and job title. If there are multiple contact owners within your company it might be a good idea to have an internal contact owner's column as well. And remember you can always add more columns and richer data at a later stage. The bare minimum of data required for an email marketing contact is an email address. Everything else that comes after that is pretty much a bonus.
Don't worry about formatting the spreadsheet to make it pretty. Less is definitely more in this case. Now get your mobile phone out and start adding contacts to your Excel spreadsheet. Put in as much detail as you can from your contact cards. And put in every contact that might be of use to you, whether that be as a past and/or future client, a competitor, an ex-employee, an influencer or a supplier/business partner. At this stage you want to get as many contacts of value listed as possible. If you don't have an email address on the contact card go to your email programme open a new mail and type in the contact's name - the email address could very well be saved in the auto-complete folder and you can extract it from there.
When it comes to company and position the best and most up-to-date details will always be on the contact's LinkedIn profile. Go there and check out what they're up to. Also a good opportunity to drop them a message whilst you there.
At the end of this process you will have you very own contacts list. Maybe 100, 200 or even 500 names with contact details. Save the Excel file first as an Excel Workbook and then save it again as a CSV UTF-8 file. And that's it - any email marketing programme will be able to import all your contacts from this single file in one single operation.
Job done!