Regardless of how you are contacting your customers, you have to have a clean database! Huzzah! It feels good to get that off my chest. Today, a lot of legacy systems (and their legacy data) are interconnected in a loosely fit collective of databases and the customer/donor /constituent/friend information is probably incomplete or out of date. I want to share a story that illustrates the importance of updating your customer information.
My large car insurance company scared the absolute dickens out of me about a month ago. You see I had a three month period, after the (now) wife got me to capitulate and move from the “Best Location in the Nation”* to the Twin Cities, where I didn’t have a real home. My apartment lease was up, but it wasn’t time to flee the Cleve. I crashed with some friends, and changed my billing address to my parent’s house before I forwarded it to Minnesota. Since I pay my bills online, this seemed like the easiest solution while I was living a Boxcar Willie lifestyle.
How did they scare me? I received a call from my dad, “your insurance company just sent you some mail to our house with a time sensitive stamp on the front, and we’ll send it out to you now.” I handle everything on line, so I was a little concerned. I have a squeaky clean driving record, until this post goes live and that is jinxed, so I wondered what in the world they wanted and why it didn’t come to my current address.
Two days later, I opened the letter. “WHY DID YOU CANCEL YOUR POLICY, YOU ARE AN IGNORANT FOOL TO GO TO ANOTHER INSURANCE COMPANY!” Okay, that’s probably not what was written, but it is what I read. I thought, “Holy Crow! They canceled my policy, or I forgot to pay my bill, or someone used my personal information in an accident and I am being booted and may have to defend myself from a life in jail when the police catch me.” I was just a hair frantic. I ran to my computer, which was off because I just got home from work. Fifteen minutes later, after every company who had a hand in making a component to my PC and some companies who even just thought about it, had announced they were in working order, I launched Firefox and logged into my account. Everything was fine. My policy had not been canceled. Whew!
After my outrage had subsided, I thought about what just happened. Clearly my insurance friends had a database of lapsed customers that did not properly communicate with their current policy holders list. Apparently, my few months of getting mail at the parent’s house ended up getting me on the lapse list and nearly put me on another lapsed list again when I expired from the stress. This company has my name, date of birth, vehicle registration number, knows if my eyes change color on a Thursday, my social security number, what pants I am wearing and a myriad of other personal information that would allow them to match my Cleveland residence with my Minnesota residence. But they could not pull that off. My guess is they have multiple databases but no way to tie the pertinent information together to really know and understand who their customers are.
It is rare that I am going to directly hustle our services on the Lorton Data Blog. The Social [Media] contract tells us it isn’t really appropriate, but in this instance to disguise my pitch as a marketing help or discussion would feel a tad false. So here it goes:
While, this was specifically a direct mail experience, the problem isn’t unique to direct mail. If you want to contact your customers in any way, it is essential to have a clean list before you contact them. Phone, email, address, really anything you want to use when you talk to them should be scrubbed. Be prepared to know your customers. They like that kind of thing. This doesn’t just mean bouncing your file against the National Change of Address Database. This means pulling the data from your CRM, and your invoicing tool, your leads spreadsheet that is still in Excel 95 and getting them matched, consolidated and processed for updated information. I can absolutely help you with that. In full disclosure, it won’t be me personally, but we have some people that are absolute experts at this stuff. Email me and we’ll get you sorted out before you begin your campaign. You can save money, increase revenue, or if you play your cards right, you’ll do both!
I’ve run a little long today, so in the near future I’ll talk about another campaign where marketing from a transaction database gave up the ghost and how the program failed to generate the level of revenue expected.
*Cleveland, Ohio!
Joel Ingersoll
