I grew up on a farm in the North-West of Victoria, Australia, the Wimmera to be exact, in what was traditionally great wheat growing country. Wide flat open spaces, with mostly good soil, warm summers and mostly just enough rain, all perfect for large scale cropping.
It occurred to me a little while back that there were many parallels between the custodial nature of looking after the productive soil of a farm and looking after the productive relationships contained within a marketing database, here then, are some useful (I hope!) allegories between good farm and database management.
Divide your database into paddocks
This is a rule that farmers learnt aeons ago but one that many marketers, particularly arts marketers are yet to learn. Take a large thing and break it down into manageable chunks. It means you can do different things with your smaller chunks, grow different crops or build different relationships. Its all about risk management, a farmer that plants the same crop on his entire farm will be ruined if that one crop fails to work, as might your campaign if you go out to your entire database with a single message or product. Just as a farmer may exercise some judgement in how he positions his paddock so too must a database marketer think about how to divide up their database, recency, frequency, demographics, geographic, drive-time, genre preferences (for the arts) are all metrics you may employ.
Not all paddocks are the same
We had a pretty good farm, not much rubbish dirt, however different paddocks did have different characteristics and needed to be managed individually. One paddock was the star, all good black soil, high yielding. One paddock was the poor cousin, too much red dirt. One paddock was good but undulating so it would have have boggy areas that didn't yield or dry out at the same rate as other parts of the paddock.
This is true for your database paddocks too, your fringe theatre paddock, won't necessarily be as big, high yielding or early buying as your musical theatre paddock. Like a good farmer, get to know your paddocks and adjust your plans accordingly.
Rotate your crops
Anyone who knows anything about growing their own vegetables knows this one, if you keep planting the same crop on the same dirt, year after year, the soil will get tired and produce a lower yield. Sometimes farmers will leave a paddock to stubble for a whole year and just run sheep on it, more recently farmers learnt that some crops return to the soil what others take out, so you swap wheat, for chickpeas, then a rest it for a year your yield for each gets higher.
Obviously you should not over work your own database paddocks either, choose to give some a rest from time to time, trying cropping it in different ways, an email here, a snail mail letter there, an early discount one time, a competition the other, these are all ways to mix things up.
Don’t over crop the one paddock
If you have a star paddock resist the urge to over crop it, even your champion sire bull will eventually get less enthusiastic if asked to service too many heifers, and he's got the best job on the farm!
Tend to your paddocks
Farmers fertilise, give paddocks a rest, attack weeds, adopt direct drilling to reduce the amount of tilling and encourage natural compost. All of these activities are about maintaining a healthy soil. You need to do the same thing with your database, run a program to get people to sign up every so often, survey it, reward loyalty, give it a rest, all of these activities help to tend your soil.
Do your maintenance – mend fences so the sheep don’t escape.
Good fences are almost always a sign of good farmers, and bad fences are a sure sign of a bad one. It's universal. Good database marketers also need to tend to their fences. Is the data tidy, correct addresses, no duplicates, no spelling errors, links to privacy statements present and are unsubscribes are being honoured? Tend to your fences, otherwise your sheep will escape too!
Sow a test crop
We had a little paddock that we could use to test new ideas, a new variety of grain, a new technique, obviously if we tried it on one of our big paddocks and it didn't work the risk was great, but trialling at small scale one year and implementing in full the next year if it worked just makes good sense. Do the same with your database, send a test message to a small number and if it works go out in full afterwards.
Talk to your neighbours – what are they doing?
Whether it be at the pub, football or stopped on a roadside somewhere, farmers are demons for shop talk, "How many bags an acre did you get on your top paddock?", "How much raid did you get?", "How did you go with barlery this year, you haven't grown that for a while right?".
There is two reasons why this is good firstly, if your neighbours soil loves chick peas, you might want to plant chick peas next year too. By sharing new ideas, success and failures we all achieve more. Also sometimes what happens on your neighbours farm affects you, I mean there's no point trying to get organic certified, if you neighbour does his own crop dusting and is VERY liberal with his application of weed killer.
As database marketers our message is not the only one hitting our patrons, by talking to your metaphorical neighbours you may find out when they might also be talking to some of your people and you can account for that in your tactics. You'll also learn from their successes and failures.
Measure results and react accordingly
Farmers LOVE talking about yield rate, in my time, all the old blokes still talked bags to an acre, why? Because its all about measuring what worked, what didn't and adjusting your plans for next year. As marketers if we don't measure results we are doomed to repeat our failures.
So if you aren't getting the best out of your database, take a leaf form my book and go and have a yarn with a farmer. You could do a lot worse!
