...atabase. In somecases, they don't even know what it is.Let me answer the question of whether you need a customerdatabase - YES! But more importantly - Why?Many large companies and even small ones will pour millions ofdollars into advertising every single year to buy customers.Essentially, to buy a customer involves putting an advert intosome medium, which could be the paper, yellow pages, magazines,television, radio or even using something like Google Adwords. The customer wi...

...ll then ring you or visit your website, based onthe advert. Whilst they are there you should be collecting thecustomer details so that you can follow-up with the customeronce they leave. The key reason you need to collect the customerdetails, is that it is very rare that you will sell to thecustomer the first time they visit your website. By collectingtheir details you can follow-up with the customers to helpconvince them that your company is a reputable company and yourproducts are in fact what they need. You may even find that ittakes up-to 27 individual contacts with a customer before theywill decide to buy from you. (The statistic of 27 times is whatmany radio stations in Australia will use to convince you to useregular radio advertising)By having a customer database, you will be then able to maintainthat contact with the customer till they decide to buy. Let'slook at it this way. If your advert costs you $200 and you onlyhad four responses or visits, then each person essentially costyou $50 to buy. Now if the product you were selling was only $20 each, and eachcustomer bought one, then you would have lost $30 on each sale.Therefore, each customer was not a worthwhile investment!However, if you had one other product that had a value of $80that you could sell to them, and each customer bought one eachof these products which totalled to $340 and you would make aprofit instead of a loss by maintaining the customers "life timevalue". The bottom line is that if you don't capture yourcustomer details into a database so that you can use them in thefuture, then more than likely you will go broke, because as mostbusiness people will tell you, its hard to sell on the firstmeeting, that is especially true of websites. Essentially, once you have the customer details in a customerdatabase you can then use a whole range of techniques tomaintain contact. In an interview by a gentleman called Mr H,(which you can listen to by visitinghttp://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp, the interviews go for about fivehours), in his internet business, he collected his customerinformation and sent to each customer a Free $5 information packby snail mail (traditional postal mail) and he did this foryears. He literally kept all his customers in a shoebox.Essentially the shoebox was his customer database. I will make apoint though, he does now use a computer based customerdatabase, but the point is that by capturing the customer'sdetails and maintaining that contact, he now does approximately$12 million a year in sales. By getting the customer to give youtheir details, you can than maintain that contact and buildrapport and eventually you should be able to convince them tobuy. My computer training business is no different. When I startedout five years ago, I had absolutely no customers and I didn'thave any contacts either in North Queensland, Australia. I havebuilt my customer database now to about 6,000 solid contactsthrough our traditional Brick's and Mortar business. Thesecontacts allow me to maintain contact with them throughnewsletters, emails, offers etc. Having this customer baseensures that even when my advertising doesn't work, andsometimes it doesn't, I can still attract business by marketingto my existing customers. Internet Marketers will call thesetypes of sales, back-end sales but all in all it is aboutselling products to yours customers that will satisfy theirneeds. Does A Customer Database Need To Be Expensive?Absolutely not! There are many ways that you can acquire acustomer database. You could in fact build your customerdatabase using database applications like Microsoft Access whichcomes with Microsoft Office. (If you would like to know a littlemore on how to build Customer Databases in Microsoft Accessvisit http://www.1-on-1.biz/products/msaccess/default.asp)Alternatively, if your not that way inclined you could look atother commercial customer databases. Now, in the commercial orprofessional world, they don't call them customer databases theywill call them a CRM system or Customer Relationship Manager.Customer Databases can cost from as little as a couple of 100dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.One of the things I certainly do encourage is that when you arebuying a customer database, make sure that you can export all ofyour data from the application and that you can update andchange the database easily. A few years ago, I had looked at anumber of accounting systems and customer database systems forsome of our clients and we found that once you put your customerinformation into these systems, you basically could not everaccess the data without using their application. I find thisreally abhorrent because if that company goes broke and the nextversion of Windows that Microsoft puts out isn't compatible withthat application, it could literally cost you millions ofdollars, to re-enter the information.Further to this, make sure that you can use other applicationslike Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook with your customerdatabase. For example, make sure you can use Microsoft Word todo tasks like mail outs, create invoices or mail merges. Inparticular make sure you can use Microsoft Outlook to email yourcustomers.If you can't afford the couple of hundred dollars for a customerdatabase have a look at the following link -http://www.1-on-1.biz/products/crm/default.asp and we have putup a Microsoft Access Database that you can use and a Free 50page instructional manual.The bottom line is this. It doesn't matter whether you arerunning a traditional Bricks and Mortar business or an InternetBusiness, you must be collecting customer details so that ifthey don't buy from you first time. You can continue maintainthat contact and build your relationship with them until theydo. At the very least, you can always contact those customersand ask them why they don't want to buy your products.