Profitability was considered as the prime motive of marketers in the early days. But now, customer value, customer delight and customer retention are perceived as the main objectives, with profitability being an outcome of achieving these objectives. Marketers must, therefore, adopt change, especially technological change, to attract customers as well as to attack competitors. Database marketing is the process of building, maintaining and using customer database and other databases (of products, suppliers, resellers) for the purpose of contacting, transacting and building customer relationships. There are different classifications of databases depending on their nature and content. This article explains the various reasons for adopting database marketing. It also discusses the approach and handling of databases by marketers in the Indian and global contexts.

Database marketing is the pro-cess of building, main taining and using customer databases and other databases (of products, suppliers, resellers) for the purpose of contacting, transacting and building customer relationships. A customer mailing list is a simply a set of names, addresses and telephone numbers of existing customers or loyal customers. A customer database, on the other hand, is an organized collection of comprehensive information about individual customers or prospects that is current, accessible and actionable for marketing purposes such as lead generation, lead qualification, sale of a product or service, or maintenance of customer relationships.

A customer database contains details of past purchase, demographics (age, income, family members and birthdays), psychographics (activities, interests and opinions), mediagraphics (preferred media) and other useful information. A business database would contain data on business customers, such as past purchase; past volumes, prices and profits; buyer team members (names, ages, birthdays, hobbies and favorite foods); status of current contracts; an estimate of the customer's share of total business; competitive suppliers; assessment of competitive strengths and weaknesses.

Majority of the companies also rely to a substantial extent on their internal database for marketing purpose. This database too serves as a tool for database marketing, i.e., for the usage of specific information about individual customers and/or prospects to implement more effective and efficient marketing.It is a leading provider of sales and marketing support data in the US and achieved net sales of $435 mn in 2006. InfoUSA's database contains information on 210 million consumers and 14 million US businesses. The data is verified and updated with over 20 million phone calls annually. The services provided with the help of this database include sales leads, mailing lists, business directories, mapping products, and also delivery of data over the Internet.

Marketing Mastermind Magazine, Database Marketing, Customer Relationships Management, CRM, Decision-Making Process, Information Technology, Corporate Strategy, E-Marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing Techniques, General Motors.