Customer Category

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Customer Category - The Customer Category Control File provides a means of grouping customers for sales management and marketing purposes. The ability to look at your sales and profits by groups of customers can help you direct efforts toward the more profitable groups. For management purposes, it is best to keep the categories rather general. If you get too detailed with the breakdown, you end up with too many categories to direct good management decisions. It is not usually worthwhile to separate shoe stores from pet shops. A category for Retail Stores is usually sufficient. There is no need to remain consistent with the levels. A distributor who specializes in serving shoe stores, for example, could set up a separate category for shoe stores and lump all other retail stores into one category. For marketing purposes, direct mail can be an effective way to serve smaller accounts. The ability to create labels and mail merge letters based on customer category can make your direct mail campaigns more effective. Also, the Customer Category File can be a convenient way of identifying inactive customers. We strongly recommend defining a customer category that identifies customers who have gone out of business or are no longer desirable customers. Extracts for customer lists, mailing labels, and mail merge can be set to bypass customers in a particular category. Even though a customer has gone out of business, they still contributed to the sales history and cannot be deleted from the system.