What to read after Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet?

I spend a lot of time in marketing-oriented discussion lists. If you do, you probably also sense the incredible frustration of people who keep asking about using their customer data to retain customers and increase profits. Everybody knows they should be doing it, but can't find out how to do it. 

Consultants and agencies make this process sound like some kind of "black magic", something you can't possibly do yourself. I disagree. I think the average business owner can do a perfectly decent job creating profiles and using them to retain customers and drive profits. Thus the book. 

The examples provided are Internet specific, but the methods can be used in any business where customer data is available.

This book is about the down-and-dirty, nitty-gritty art of taking chunks of data generated by your customers and making sense of it, getting it to speak to you, creating insight into what types of marketing or general business actions you can take to make your business more profitable. 

We'll be talking about "action-oriented" ideas you can generate on your own to drive sales and profits, ideas that will reveal themselves by analyzing your own customer data, using only a spreadsheet. 

We have all heard how important it is to collect customer data, to "know" your customer. What I don't hear much about is what exactly you DO with all that data once you have collected it. How is it used? What exactly is Drilling Down into the data supposed to tell me, and what am I looking for when I get there? For that matter, what data should I be collecting and how will I use it when I have it? And how much is this process going to cost me? 

The following list outlines what you will learn and be able to do after reading the Drilling Down book: 

--What data is important to collect about a customer and what data is not 

--How to create action-oriented customer profiles with an Excel spreadsheet 

--How to use these profiles to plan marketing promotions 

--How to use these profiles to define the future value of your customers 

--How to use these profiles to measure the general health of your business 

--How to use these profiles to encourage customers to do what you want them to 

--How to predict when a customer is about to defect and leave you 

--How to increase your profits while decreasing your marketing costs 

--How to design high ROI (Return on Investment) marketing promotions 

How to blow away investors with predictions of the future profitability of your business 

Table of Contents 

Chapter 1: What's a Customer Profile? 

Chapter 2: Data-Driven Marketing - Customer Retention Basics 

Chapter 3: The Language of Data, The Science of Profit 

Chapter 4: Interactivity Changes the Rules of the Game 

Chapter 5: How to Build a Customer Profiling Spreadsheet 

Chapter 6: How to Profile (Score) Your Customers 

Chapter 7: Marketing Using Customer Scores - Basic Approach 

Chapter 8: Using Customer Characteristics and Multiple Scores

Chapter 9: Watching Scores over Time - Customer LifeCycles 

Chapter 10: Customer Scoring Grids - Profiling on Steroids 

Chapter 11: Calculating and Using LifeTime Value in Promotions

Chapter 12: Turning Profiles into Profits - the Staging Area 

Chapter 13: Turning Profiles into Profits - the Financial Model 

Chapter 14: Turning Profiles into Profits - Financial Tweaks 

Chapter 15: Measuring Success in Best Customer Promotions 

Chapter 16: Some Final Thoughts 

Seasonal Adjustments to Marketing Promotions 

Don't Fight Customer Behavior 

CRM Software and Customer Scoring 

Data-Driven Marketing Program Descriptions 

There's more! Automate the basic customer scoring process on large groups of customers. Use the software included free with this edition! Windows OS and MS Access and Excel required to run the software.