The objective for every customer acquisition initiative is the same: to reach prospects who are ready, willing and able to buy the products offered. The challenge is also the same: to pick these prospects out of a population of more than 200 million adult Americans. The cost, accuracy and breadth of prospect data will have a major impact on the ROI each marketing initiative achieves. If you find yourself bogged down in excessive data analysis, you may be approaching “analysis paralysis.” Your data simply may not be adequate to give you the information you need to identify qualified prospects.

Data Warehouse Corporation, the leading provider of full-service direct marketing solutions to the financial services industry, is partnered with Equifax and utilizes a proprietary data management platform to offer the industry’s largest, most accurate mortgage prospect database. They offer the following guidelines you should consider as you build your own database.

1) Identify attributes that distinguish your best existing clients.

2) Find data sources that provide the distinguishing attributes. Prospect contact information and credit standing can change overnight, and an outdated or poorly scrubbed database will have you wasting time and money on prospects who don't want your product or no longer qualify for it. You should evaluate sources in terms of breadth (the extent, timeliness and quality of the records provided for each prospect) as well as depth (the number of prospects and their distribution across regions or market segments).

3) Identify the prospects who are ready, willing and able to buy your offering.

4) Make sure that you follow FCRA mandates, and that your data sources are scrubbed for “Do Not Call” compliance and other consumer privacy requirements regularly.

5) Obtain constant feedback through testing, measuring and refining.

The goal is to make your marketing database the learning engine for your long-term program. Every time you add new prospects or update existing lists, it should be able to convert the new information into additional value.

For more information on marketing database development, analytics or Data Warehouse’s full array of customer acquisition and retention solutions, call 1-800-810-0630.

Ben Waldshan is CEO and Co-Founder of Data Warehouse Corp. and Barry Jamieson is SVP of Equifax.

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