Database Marketing Services: The Full Guide [with Examples]

Contact AccuData today to learn more about our database marketing services.

Database marketing couples information within a brand’s database with third-party information to serve as the foundation of all marketing efforts. As you’ll see, this reliance on data can drastically increase the ROI of marketing efforts— so it’s understandable why so many brands and agencies are turning to data marketing strategies.

In this guide, we’re going to dive into database marketing services through the lens of the custom services offered by AccuData Integrated Marketing. We’ll take a look at key database marketing services as well as case studies to see these services in action.

To help solidify your understanding of database marketing, we’ll explore the following points:

Feel free to use the navigation above to jump down to the section that piques your interest. Or, continue reading to explore the full guide.

Let’s get started.

This section covers the basics of database marketing services.

Definition of Database Marketing

What do database marketers do?

Database marketers are marketing professionals who base their efforts on the data contained within a client’s database. This could mean internal data or third-party data that’s appended to the original database. Regardless, all marketing efforts are tied back to the client’s database and the information within it.

Database marketing professionals base their efforts on the data in a client's database.

Why would a brand or firm want to invest in database marketing services? Well, there are a few benefits such as:

  • Quantifiable and measurable results.
  • The ability to target audiences with precision.
  • A more effective, efficient use of marketing dollars.

With database marketing, you can obtain a clear view of the exact audience you’re trying to reach and how that audience is best targeted. Rather than dedicating time and resources to efforts that might work, you can dedicate the same resources to efforts that have a proven likelihood of success.

There are a variety of database marketing services that can be leveraged to develop a successful data marketing strategy. This spans from data enhancement to full targeted marketing campaigns.

As you read, we’re going to cover five main database marketing services and how those services have been used to help businesses increase their ROI.


Consider using any of the following database marketing services to improve your outreach.

5 Database Marketing Services to Increase ROI

Database management is the first database marketing service we're going to discuss.

Database Management

To utilize your database for improved marketing return, your data must be accurate and precise. In the tech-driven age, we’re able to collect more information than ever before in order to connect with your brand’s target audience. That said, it’s also easier than ever to introduce errors into your database— the overwhelming amount of records can easily be led astray with a single keystroke.

When it comes to optimizing your database for use, there are a variety of services available. These include:

  • Data Hygiene and Processing: This encompasses all of the processes involved with discovering errors in your database and alleviating them. Data hygiene services often involve an audit to discover inaccuracies, record standardization, email and postal address verification, and more.
  • Database Development and Hosting: This includes creating solutions that connect your brand’s disparate data sources into a usable, accessible database. Whether linking transactional POS data or eCommerce data to your current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform or building an entirely new custom database, database development ensures you have a usable and secure collection of valuable customer data.
  • Batch Records Updating: Whether you’re dealing with an outdated database or a significant number of incomplete records, you can invest in batch updating to ensure your data paints the full picture. Demographic, firmographic, and contact attributes are available for batch updates.

Because you need clean, effective, and accurate data to carry out marketing initiatives, database management is an essential part of any successful database marketing strategy.

Example of this Database Marketing Service

In 2014, a large, multi-campus university system was struggling to use its alumni database to the fullest extent in a marketing capacity. The university’s alumni records were out-of-date and missing key details, including email addresses, postal addresses, and cell phone numbers.

Explore this data hygiene case study, a popular database marketing service.

Without this information, effective direct marketing to their alumni was challenging. Direct mail, email, and phone solicitation were all out of reach. To overcome this challenge, the AccuData team created a custom data management solution that included the following:

  • Correcting and standardizing all postal and email addresses.
  • Verifying all postal and email addresses and identifying when new addresses were needed.
  • Conducting batch updates, including multichannel contact information.
  • Enhancing the data with additional demographic and psychographic intelligence, such as income, marital status, presence of children, and lifestyle attributes.

Due to these services, the multi-campus university was well-prepared to connect with alumni and other supporters for fundraising initiatives. Further, they were able to distribute this information to each of its campuses across the state, equipping all satellites with the tools to conduct successful outreach. To learn more, access AccuData’s data hygiene case study.

Data enhancement is the second database marketing service we're going to discuss.

Data Enhancement

With so many efforts taking place over technology— marketing, communications, and even direct sales— your brand has more opportunities than ever before to collect data on your audience. That said, the information you collect still may not be enough for an effective database marketing campaign.

When it comes to data enhancement, the following database marketing services are key to ensuring you have a full picture of your target audience:

  • Demographic Append: This allows you to enhance your data with customer demographics, such as age, income, marital and familial status, lifestyle attributes (interests/hobbies), and buying behaviors.
  • Email Append: With this, not only can you identify customers’ most recent email addresses, but you can also confirm they want to receive marketing emails from you. With a Reverse Email Append, contact names and postal addresses can be identified based on the email addresses in your database.
  • Reverse Phone Append: This uses the telephone numbers in your database to identify the names and postal addresses of those in your audience file. On the other hand, a Phone Append can identify missing phone numbers in your database.
  • Firmographic Append: This allows you to collect information on a business, such as the industry it operates in, its structure, annual revenue and market size, and contact information (e.g. location, phone number, email addresses, and web addresses).
  • Geo-Coding: This appends latitude and longitude data to your existing loyalty data, allowing you to geographically target and personalize your outreach.

With that, let’s look at an advanced version of data enhancement services— real-time data append.

Example of this Database Marketing Service

Real-time append enables your team to access contact and demographic information in real time, with just a name, phone number, or postal address. This instant updating of records equips your marketing team with immediate insights, such as gender, marital status, ethnicity, occupation, and more. With this real-time information, your team can create engaging, personalized outreach with efficiency from the start.

These services are most effective in the automotive, energy, financial services, insurance, hospitality, retail, senior living services, and telecommunications industries. That said, let’s look at two use cases for real-time append.

Explore two data enhancement use cases to learn more about this database marketing service.

Retirement Community Builds Buyer Profiles

A retirement community offers resort-style senior living across many states. With real-time append, their team is able to build buyer profiles aligning with property recommendations.

When an interested party submits an inquiry to their site, specified demographic data, such as age, home market value, income, living area square footage, marital status, net worth, and occupation, are appended to the contact record in real time. This enables the team to recommend properties that the interested party is most likely to respond to.

Retailer Offering Custom Recommendations

A retailer wants to use its retail app and location services to offer personalized shopping recommendations to users. When the app is installed on shoppers’ phones, the app captures each consumer’s name and email address.

When location services are enabled, the customer’s latitude and longitude are sent to the retailer’s database. When the user is within a 10-mile radius of the retailer, real-time append provides a buyer profile for that shopper based on style preferences, affordability, and the weather. With this information, the retailer can send push notifications customized to the user featuring product recommendations and coupons.

Audience building is another popular database marketing service.

Audience Building

Effective marketing and outreach is dependent on targeting the right audiences. You could create the highest-quality copy, images, and ads, but if you’re sending them to the wrong audience, the communications will likely go unnoticed.

The prior two services we highlighted focused on building out your organization’s database. Now, we’re looking at how a marketing analytics company would use that information to build out the ideal audiences for your campaign.

The following database marketing facets are some that this team might use to develop your audience:

  • Third-Party Data: This includes obtaining and working with third-party data, such as compiled consumer/business data, specialty data, propensity data, and more.
  • Customer Personas: The combination of your internal data with third-party data allows database marketers to build out personas for what your brand’s ideal customer would look like. Further, you can identify lookalike audiences similar to your personas and focus your marketing efforts to target both.
  • Predictive Modeling: With this, you can go beyond customer personas to predict the response to your marketing efforts and purchasing behavior of your customers and prospects.
  • In-Market Intel: This helps you build an audience by giving consumer contact information (e.g. name, phone number, email address) about those that have recently visited your (or a competing) location, those that have recently browsed for products similar to yours online, or even those making life-stage decisions that are related to your product.
  • Web Visitor Intel: With this, your website becomes a lead-generation machine. Web Visitor Intel involves embedding a line of custom code that gives you real-time information on website visitors.

Now, let’s explore a case study through which these database marketing facets were used to develop an audience and improve the ROI of marketing efforts.

Examples of this Database Marketing Service

A national fitness franchise with 700 locations sought to improve the response rates with their marketing efforts. The project began as a customer persona effort, but that soon proved unsuccessful. Their ideal customers also happened to closely match those already saturating the geographic area surrounding their locations— so, why weren’t their response rates improving?

This is where the AccuData team was brought into the project. Applying predictive modeling to the data, AccuData applied 200 predictive elements to examine the differences between two key groups within their targeted audience: those that were responding and those that weren’t.

Explore this audience building case study, which explores a popular database marketing service.

By doing this, the team was able to discover which elements were most likely to be positive influences on the likelihood of response, such as card usage and age. By targeting those within their audience that also had those elements, the franchise was able to improve response rates by over 100%.

To explore this further, check out AccuData’s predictive modeling case study.

Targeted digital marketing is a popular database marketing service.

Targeted Digital Marketing

Beyond building out audiences, the next chronological step in database marketing is creating the actual marketing campaigns used to target those audiences. In this section, we’re going to focus on the many types of targeted digital marketing campaigns that a firm might assist your team with implementing.

It’s important to note that there are a variety of efforts that go into digital marketing campaigns, from developing initial audiences to managing the creative direction overall. Some database marketing firms may only handle the logistical elements while others (such as AccuData) are equipped to handle the effort from start to finish.

With that, let’s explore a few specific digital marketing services a firm might offer:

  • IP and location-based marketing: This allows you to hyper-target prospects in your audience wherever they are, whether at their homes, at an event, or elsewhere. By focusing your efforts on specific IP addresses, you can reach prospects in the exact location you’re targeting.
  • Connected TV/OTT Advertising: This involves sending video advertisements to potential customers through popular streaming services. You’re able to target these ads to reach specific audiences, including those who are in a certain geographic location, fit certain demographics, or something else.
  • Social Media Advertising: This involves sending advertisements through social media platforms to users who fit within your target audience. One popular example is paid ads on Facebook or Instagram.

To explore these marketing efforts further and learn tips for implementing them successfully, download AccuData’s digital marketing success kit. With that, let’s explore a case study including these services.

Example of this Database Marketing Service

Rib City, a franchise specializing in barbeque, introduced a new online ordering system that allowed customers to find nearby locations, learn about the specials of the day, and place digital orders. To increase downloads of their mobile ordering app, Rib City wanted to improve its social media presence and get in front of its target audience.

Rib City partnered with AccuData to conduct a hyperlocal social media campaign on Facebook. The AccuData team created the campaign collateral (including images and text), selected the audience, and managed the campaign from start to finish. The campaign targeted a niche audience, including 25-34-year-olds with an affinity for barbeque or grilling, who were within a 5-mile radius of a Rib City location.

In this case study, explore digital marketing-- a popular database marketing service.

With this campaign alone, Rib City was able to secure almost 500 downloads of its mobile app. To learn more about the process, find the Rib City case study here.

Explore email marketing, the final database marketing service we're discussing in this guide.

Email Marketing

Last but not least, let’s discuss another popular campaign type that a database marketing firm might assist with: email marketing.

For nonprofits and businesses alike, email is a powerhouse when it comes to direct digital marketing efforts. There are a few email-specific database marketing services that might benefit your strategy:

  • Email Append: As we touched on earlier, this includes identifying the email addresses of customers in your database and verifying that the customer is interested in receiving communications from your team.
  • Email Acquisition: Email acquisition campaigns enable marketers to reach targeted new audiences based on a brand’s predetermined demographic, geographic, and other criteria.
  • A/B Testing Campaigns: This involves testing how your email campaigns will perform with slight variations to determine which communications will perform optimally.

Additionally, some database marketing firms (such as AccuData) can build the infrastructure for your team to collect email addresses in a database and automate campaigns to designated audiences. As with the other digital marketing services, it’s up to you whether you want to invest in more full-service assistance.
With that, let’s explore an email marketing case study.

Examples of this Database Marketing Service

A provider of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning services was interested in using email marketing to connect with current and prospective customers. However, they were apprehensive due to the time and resource-intensive nature of such a project.

Explore this email marketing case study, which shows one of the many database marketing services offered by AccuData.

The HVAC provider partnered with AccuData to manage their email marketing program, and AccuData did the following:

  • Managed creative design, translating their printed materials to digital formats following design best practices.
  • Prepared and managed email lists.
  • Tracked and reported on email delivery.

AccuData provided full management of the HVAC company’s email marketing program and the business saw immediate results. The program’s deliverability rates were consistently over 96% and the open and click-through rates were well above industry standard.

To explore this case further, download AccuData’s email marketing case study.


Learn more about AccuData's database marketing services.

Learn More About AccuData’s Database Marketing Services

Database marketing is a powerful tool for brands looking to increase marketing ROI. It gives your team quantifiable and measurable results, the ability to target audiences with precision, and a more effective, efficient use of marketing dollars.

The team at AccuData Integrated Marketing can conduct all of the above database marketing services for your team and more.

Rather than equipping your team with a standardized, out-of-the-box data management platform as some firms might, the AccuData team creates custom data solutions that are tailored to meet your brand’s exact needs. This ensures that you don’t access too much (or too little!) data to be impactful but rather, the insights that are key to fueling your marketing efforts for success.

Additionally, all services conducted by the AccuData team can be implemented in a way that integrates directly with your existing marketing tech stack. You won’t have to worry about extensive data migrations. Instead, all information will be available for your team in the solutions that you’re already used to using.

To learn more about database marketing and AccuData’s services, explore the following additional resources:

Contact AccuData today to learn more about our database marketing services.

Written by Gabrielle Perham, MBA