Your customers are the driving force behind your business. Finding new customers costs more than selling more (or more often) to current ones. It makes a great deal of sense, therefore, to build strong relationships with your existing customers.

A good database will give you the information you need to:

• Communicate one-to-one with your customers
• Identify the people most likely to buy from you
• Define customers' needs and preferences
• Target your products, services and marketing communications more effectively
• Monitor the effectiveness of your promotional activity
• Identify each customer's purchasing cycle

There are three main ways to create a database:

1. Buy a software package and tailor it for your business
2. Contract an IT/database specialist to build it for you
3. Contract a database bureau to develop, maintain, access and store your database at their facility

Tips for creating and maintaining a database

Things to remember when capturing data