There is perhaps nothing more essential to the earned revenue of most arts organizations than a clean, current, and accurate customer list. The names, contact information, and transaction profile of anyone who has donated, visited, bought, or registered in some other way are the key to the large majority of your future revenue. Not a revelation, I hope.<\/p>\n
But even assuming you have a clean, current, and accurate list (which most organizations do not), what do you do with it? There’s much to be learned from the world of direct marketing, and here’s at least one place<\/a> to begin. Jim Novo describes three primary analysis models for exploring and exploiting your transaction list. According to him:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you have long sales cycles, (durable goods like cars, appliances), sell very expensive products (enterprise software), or are a service business with ongoing billing which doesn’t vary much month to month (utilities, phone, ISP) then you will probably want to start with the Latency Model<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you have tons of low value transactions with your customers – page views being a prime example – say in publishing \/ ad-supported \/ content oriented web sites, or are in retail with a low and narrow price range (books, CD’s), you should start out with the Recency Model<\/a>.<\/p>\n