Marketers commonly use databases of customers or potential customers (also referred to as “leads”) to generate personalized communications to promote a product or service. The method of communication can be any addressable medium, e.g., direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing, and the like.
A marketing database may combine of disparate sources of customer, lead, and/or prospect information so that marketing professionals may act on that information. However, it can be difficult to provide access to a rich set of data in a way that makes sense to the end user of the data (e.g., marketers), as opposed to a database administrator.
Indeed, despite the existence of current enterprise marketing management suites that purport to integrate marketing databases with campaign management and other marketing tools, it is still common for marketers to hire database consultants to perform common tasks such as defining a market segment and identifying records belonging to the defined market segment. Thus, with existing tools, defining a marketing segment and obtaining a snapshot of its members may be a difficult, expensive, and/or time-consuming process. Moreover, it may be similarly difficult, expensive, and/or time-consuming to update a snapshot of a previously-defined market segment as new records are obtained and/or existing records are modified.