Editing Database marketing (section)

=== Consumer data ===
In to existing customers, more sophisticated marketers often build broad databases of customer information. These may include a variety of data, including name and address, history of shopping and purchases, demographics, and the history of past communications to and from customers. For larger companies with millions of customers, such [[data warehouse]]s can often be multiple terabytes in size.

Marketing to prospects general, database marketers seek to have as data available about customers and prospects as possible. For marketing relies extensively on third-party sources of data. In most developed countries, there are a number of providers of such data. Such data is usually restricted to name, address, and telephone, along with demographics, some supplied by consumers, and others inferred by the data compiler. Companies may also acquire prospect data directly through the use of sweepstakes, contests, on-line registrations, and other lead generation activities.