Marketing Business Recommendations

IPT realizes the importance of knowing our customers better. This allows IPT to know who our customers are and what needs our customers have so that we may tailor our products and marketing strategies to meet those needs. Tools that we can use to assist us achieve that goal are Internet, Customer Relationship Management tools and databases.

The internet allows IPT to promote our product and communicate with our customers. The internet is the most popular media being used today and it will only grow in the future as the price of computers drop and the capabilities increase. We will use the internet to send emails to customers regarding sales and to ask them to complete surveys. The internet will allow IPT to get feedback from our customers concerning our product via surveys and customer comments. We would be able to offer a free gift or discount to our customers for completing the surveys and this will also help to flourish our relationship with them. This can be done for our retail and commercial customers although we would have to design a customer specific survey for our commercial customers such as the flower and gift basket company and the Amish food manufacturer. We would also have to design other commercial specific surveys for other commercial accounts that we acquire.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) involves using a detailed customer data base to help us to refine our marketing effort. This data base usually consists of information such as our customer’s past purchases, frequency of purchases and other segmenting information. (Perreault & McCarthy, 2006) A successful implementation of an Information Technology-enabled CRM will allow interaction between IPT and our customers locally, regionally and nationally. CRM is a tool for competitive advantage as it allows us to promote profitable one on one relationships with our customers for the long run. It will also allow us to interact with our retail and commercial customers. We will need to work with our commercial customers to develop a system that we can use together to track purchasing histories of our customers and then work together to offer products that will attract potential customers as well as keeping established customers returning. (sciencedirect.com, 2005)

Databases are a great tool for knowing our customers. There are 24 essential database marketing techniques and anyone working in the marketing field needs to be familiar with all of these methods. Some of the 24 database marketing techniques include;

1. Customer Lifetime Value which is used for direct market strategy

2. Recency, Frequency and Monetary Analysis is a successful way for predicting which of our customers or potential customers will respond to specific promotions

3. Customer communication will us to personalized customer communications and this has been shown (using tests and controls) to increase customer retention, loyalty, cross sales, up sales and referrals.

4. Predictive models use appended demographic and behavioral data, we can create models that accurately