Using the marketing features in ADaM can boost your sales and profitability. The process of putting your customer information to work for you is called data mining, and it is powering the shift toward personalized marketing across every industry.

As part of the ADaM Customer System, there is a marketing subsystem that is available from the customer menu.

There are two steps to using the ADaM Marketing System. First, creating a ‘selection profile’ will define the parameters used to select your customers or prospects. This is the data mining part. After defining the selection profile (also known as a data mining model), you can ‘build’ the selection list. Then choose the method of contact. Will you mail a letter; send a flyer, e-mail, or fax? Will you be using a ‘phone’ campaign? The ADaM Marketing servers will allow you to deliver content to your customers or contacts in a variety of ways.

The marketing servers are used to output your marketing content to the customers or prospects from a selected profile. The servers that are available allow you to create and generate a personalized letter, print labels for flyers, or envelopes for your letters.

A marketing fax server allows you to create any faxable document and ‘broadcast’ fax that document to the selected list. An E-mail server works similar to the broadcast fax server and produces a broadcast e-mail. And finally, an export server will allow you to customize the export of name and address data for mail houses or maybe to a spreadsheet program for further analysis.

The basics of data mining (or target marketing) are simple. The first step to a successful campaign is to target your approach. Are you trying to unload dead or excess stock or increase the sales volume of items with a high return? Second, build a team to implement the plan. Begin with Management, IS, Marketing and the Order Desk. Third, choose your project and define the data that will be necessary to select your customers or prospects. Some of the data in your ADaM system is automatically accumulating. Sometimes the data needs to be established by customer, such as customer types, or customer application coding.

Example 2: The application codes in the customer system are similar to the Customer Type. They allow you greater flexibility in defining the ‘personality’ or demographics of your customers. Aircraft companies use these codes to define the type of aircraft that their customers fly. Assuming that application codes have been defined for your customers, let’s say that we are a book distributor and it’s the springtime and we want to send a special flyer out to all of our customers that have some association with weddings. Using the Selection Profile System, you would use ‘additional information’ from the customer applications codes file and ‘filter’ only those customers that have been coded as being involved in the wedding industry. Then, build the selection list. Next, we want to mail out the ‘weddings’ flyer. We could create labels to adhere to the flyers for mailing, or we could ‘export’ the selected list to a file that would be sent to our mailing house. Either way, we have targeted only the customers that we wanted to contact and at a reasonable cost.