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Written by Christopher Hosford; featured on BtoBOnline.com

Like virtually everything in the business world, database marketing seems to have undergone profound changes as economic pressures mount. To marketers, lists are still important but the uses to which they are put seem to be in transition.

Today, database marketing is downplaying prospecting and focusing instead on customer retention, cross- and up-selling, revenue and other hard metrics of marketing ROI.

“Originally we used our acquired databases for prospecting, working with different list services or assembling lists from organic search or trade shows,” said Jake Athey, online marketing manager at Widen Enterprises.

“But this has changed quite a bit recently, as our database has become much more of a nurturing tool and a resource for sales, and not so much a lead-generation tool,” he said. Widen manages and archives rich media (video, audio files, PDFs, print-to-Web, etc.) for health care companies, universities, manufacturers and other organizations that create such content.

“We use our lists primarily for positioning ourselves with people who are looking for our solutions, to understand trends and to further build out our list,” Athey said. This puts Widen squarely in today's database marketing trend: focusing inwards and perfecting the customer information you already have.

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“There's no doubt that with the economic downturn, the business case is critical for database marketing,” said Naras Eechambadi, founder and former CEO of customer analytics consultancy Quaero, and now senior VP-general manager of the company after its acquisition last year by CSG Systems.

“You build an ROI case on the customer life cycle, looking for where your biggest bang for the buck is and where to prioritize, and then overlay that on your database.”

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