Strategy: Maintaining a Relational vs. Flat File Marketing Database

A housefile, or customer list, is a valuable marketing tool if you maintain it properly. It enables more targeted marketing; facilitates various analyses; and generates incremental income from renting and/or exchanging names with other reputable mailers.

When talking about building and maintaining a customer housefile, there are two issues you need to address: 1) collecting data into your order entry system, and 2) extracting relevant subsets of this data to build a marketing database. If you circulate multiple catalog titles or have a large file of records for which you’d like to see transactional history and do complex queries, maintaining a relational database (vs. a flat file) might be the way to go. There are advantages to both.