IDG Contributor Network: Better marketing requires knowing your entire customer base

The larger a company gets, the harder it is to personalize interactions with customers, especially in a time when so many transactions are conducted online. Once you reach hundreds of thousands of sales, it can be easy to think of your customer base as a whole, rather than homing in on any one individual.Unfortunately, that approach has led to a backlash for many companies, which find that customers eventually choose a smaller, more local business that treats them as a name rather than a number.