Understand Your Customers by Increasing Address Quality

One of the most critical factors that is often overlooked in regards to Address Quality is the ability to better understand and view your customers.  Here’s is what I mean.

Suppose you have customers John Smith at 125 Ferret Street and J Smith at 125 Ferret Avenue Apt 2.

The John Smith at Ferret Street has purchased 9 products from you over the years, but none in the past 12 months.  However since he’s been a customer of yours, he has purchased $1400 worth of your products.

The J Smith at Ferret Avenue Apt 2 has purchased a $65 item from you 5 months ago but nothing before or since then.

Based on their past buying history, you would treat these two customers (or should) very differently.  In fact, if you were doing a mailing to only customers who purchased over $100 from you within the past 6 months or who has spent over $1500 life to date neither one of them would receive your mailing and you and they would miss out on a great opportunity to connect.

However through the proper use of address integrity products and duplicate identification processes we have cleaned up their information and these two customers now become one. 

Bad news is you just lost a customer. 

Great news is that you identified one of your best customers. Now you can communicate with him in a whole different way and acknowledge the fact that he indeed is one of your best customers.

The value of using address integrity and deduplication tools is not just to clean your list to insure sure it complies to USPS regulations, that is really the “no brainer” part of the equation.  The real value here is to use the results of the process to clean your customer file, apply the changes and discover the hidden gems of opportunity you now have to work with.  There are many business rules that need to be considered when taking the changes from these products and incorporating them back to your database so it’s best to work with an experienced company and individual (I can recommend one) to help you understand all the ramifications associated with doing this. 

But be aware – typically you will end up with fewer customers than you had previous.  So if you get compensated on growing your list this may be a problem for you.  However – if you get compensated for growing revenue, you just got yourself a raise.

• Tags:
• catalog mail
• catalog prospecting
• data
• increase ROI

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