What if your dormant contacts had actually become unreachable?
The proportion of inactive customers is on average between 20 and 50% of a database – customers who no longer respond to the company’s requests. Before investigating the marketing and sales reasons for a possible disinterest, you should check one essential element: customer contact information.
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Even though each company defines its own criteria and the period of time from which it considers a customer to be inactive, the causes are fairly universal, and can include the following: the purchasing behavior of a versatile clientele that has left for the competition, a rate of communication from the company that is too low (causing the company to be forgotten) or too high, with the risk of the customer losing interest.
However, some dormant contacts may no longer be responding because they are no longer receiving your messages. Indeed, a customer database evolves according to the changes that occur for customers that impact their contact data:
Emails and phone numbers: while most people keep the same email address and phone number over the long term, this is not something that is always the case. A personal email address can change, for example by switching to a different internet service provider that allocates a new address on its domain name. In addition, it is not uncommon for people to create several personal email addresses and then abandon one in favor of another. As for phone numbers, sometimes you use several numbers – for example, home landline, personal mobile and business mobile – which may change or become inactive.
In B2B databases, changes follow the rhythm of careers. Thus, more than 20% of the contacts in a B2B database become obsolete each year. Contact information is also modified by the life cycle of companies – creation, acquisition, closing, etc. – which may impact the company name, address, domain name and email addresses of employees.
In the historical databases where the first contacts were stored more than 20 years ago, there are contacts that were created when email and cell phone numbers were not yet part of essential contact information. Your customers have undoubtedly taken on these contact methods since then, but if the information has not been collected, they remain outside your email or text message campaigns.
Postal addresses are obviously impacted by moves. Again, without tracking and updating customer data, moves will bring about undelivered mail for catalogs, samples or other mailings.
Also, contact information holds leads to re-engage inactive customers. Here are 3 data quality tips to stop passing up customers whose contact information has changed:
1 - Cleanse obsolete customer data from dormant contacts
Processing of the customer database, to be repeated regularly, allows for identifying contact data that leads to unsuccessful contact attempts or that is erroneous. All this information must be corrected or, failing that, deleted, since it does not allow for you to reach customers. In particular, a curative treatment of the database allows you to:
Verify postal addresses: the control of postal addresses in the database ensures that they have been correctly entered and suggests a correction of the address if necessary. In this address cleansing, the addresses in the database are compared with the addresses in the postal repositories. This guarantees that your mail will get to the right person! And if your database is international, look for a solution that operates with international postal standards and meets the requirements of countries such as France and the United States.
Also, make sure to update the number of people who have moved. You need to identify whether a contact in your database has moved, to integrate the new address according to the postal reference system if the information is available, or to contact them by another means to ask the customer for their new address.
Checking email addresses: data quality processing allows you to identify undeliverable addresses because the username or domain name does not exist (or no longer exists). These addresses probably include emails that have become obsolete, an opportunity to perform an update by asking the customer on another channel.
Checking telephone numbers: it is possible to check the existence of a landline or mobile telephone number with all operators (both local and international). This check improves contactability and increases the number of successful calls. Another data quality capability useful for requalifying dormant contacts is to identify whether or not the phone line has been active recently – an inactive line is probably not the right one anymore.
2 - Sort out "false inactives" - these are not dormant contacts!
Some customers in your base remain interested in your offers, but they are not on the radar of your mailing lists because of a lack of data quality. To correct these “false inactives”:
Reintegrate erroneously invalidated email addresses: This happens when ISP servers are not responding when emails from a database call them. These emails may end up being invalidated, even though they belong to customers who are indeed active. The quality control of your database allows you to correct the situation.
Deduplicate: when several records exist in the database for the same client, one or more of which may contain obsolete data. These outdated records add to the rate of inactive customers, even though your customer is still in contact with and buying from your company. Cleaning the database, updating it and deduplicating it will solve the problem. This will reduce the number of inactive customers in the database, and the costs associated with undelivered mail – in particular, UDPs in postal mailings, which are costly in terms of logistics and undelivered mail!
3 - Keep in touch with the right information
Once you have straightened out customer contact information, you can re-engage those you haven’t spoken with in a while. The next step is to keep in touch. In addition to regular qualitative processing of the database, data quality provides guarantees that you will lose sight of no one:
Avoid entering incorrect contact data into the database with input help and autocomplete to assist internal departments and customers on the website to enter data that is complete, controlled, and leads to successful contact.
Avoid creating duplicates by checking the pre-existence of a customer record in the database. This solution makes it possible to update the one and only reference record, and to no longer leave untracked records with outdated data ‘wandering’ in the database.
Protect your email deliverability: email is a preferred contact channel for many companies. However, it is subject to “hard bounces” on invalid addresses, which eventually degrade the reputation of the sender with the ISP servers. Cleaning up invalid and erroneous emails allows you to bypass the phenomenon of blacklisting of the company’s emails, and to ensure that its messages reach its customers.
Data quality thus enables a virtuous circle to be set in motion with data that is reliable, controlled, and above all leads to successfully contacting a customer. Then – and only then – comes the stage for examining the business and marketing reasons for disengaging proven inactive customer records.
About DQE
Because data quality is essential to customer knowledge and the construction of a lasting relationship, since 2008, DQE has provided its clients with innovative and comprehensive solutions that facilitate the collection of reliable data.
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