Print-Plus: Keeping Your House in Order

I often see companies going to great lengths to capture data they'll never use. Determine how you're going to use the data before you take the time, trouble and expense of capturing it. Your plan has to be both convenient and scalable.

When deciding which information to capture, it makes sense to retain all customer and associated transaction data during the order-processing step. Such extensive data can all be incorporated into a large-scale marketing database. For the purpose of creating a simple housefile, however, the basic information required includes name and address, date of purchase, dollar amount of the purchase, and the source code related to the purchase. From these few pieces of data you can then go on to determine a customer's gender, total lifetime dollars spent, original purchase date and most recent purchase date.