Unlock the Power of Your Customer Information

Targeted communications that really sell depend on understanding and correctly using customer permissions, preferences and suppressions.

All too often we see marketers struggling with customer information that has been thrown together without a clear, concise structure. The resulting information can seriously erode the effectiveness of your marketing program.

Best practices abound for marketers utilizing e-mail, direct mail and other channels. But understanding the full range of customer-level information that should govern the use of these channels is still unclear. And the stakes are high: customer information is the key to achieving relevance and effectiveness in direct marketing.

Without a good information structure, audience selection is more difficult, campaign impact is lessened, customer satisfaction can be injured and the company can even run afoul of privacy regulations. Even good information can go bad over time, if it is not kept up to date.

Luckily, there is a solution. You will need to sort and classify your customer information into three distinct types, each of which defines a particular aspect of the customer (more on this in a minute). This information then becomes the basis for knowing which customers will accept your communications, and where their interests lie. Such a structure allows you to map out effective marketing programs, from planning through execution and into measurement.

Clear definitions in this area also help to make sure that the technology that manages the campaigns is built to support the need. Taking a step up, clear delineation of these types of information should also be taken into account when developing or refining a corporate privacy policy.

We start untangling the typical info-snarl by establishing three primary types of information that need to be considered in order to manage customer communications.

Permissions
The first of these is customer communication permissions. Permissions track whether or not a given customer has granted the company the right to communicate with him or her. The creation of permission information should be governed by a company’s privacy policy and changes to this should be driven by input from the customer.

The tricky area here is correctly setting the specificity of the permission. In other words, it needs to be very clear to both customer and company what is meant by somebody saying, “Yes, you can send me other communications.” So, if the customer opts-in on the Mega Conglomerate Corp. web site, does that mean that they’ve agreed to receive information from all Mega-Conglomerate brands, or just a category of brands, or just one product? Hopefully this is spelled out for the consumer, but it’s easy to see how it can be confusing. When designing permissions, it’s entirely imaginable for them to be granted to a single brand, a specific newsletter or an entire company.

Permissions can also be broken out into channel specifics: a customer can allow e-mail but disallow telephone contact.

Preferences
Customer preferences are sometimes confused with permissions. The confusion typically happens when permissions are too narrowly segmented—such as when a customer opts in for information about a particular model in a lineup and nothing else. Unfortunately, defining permissions at that level typically produces more headaches than benefits. Can you imagine trying to navigate through all of the combinations of permissions possible for a multi-brand giant with thousands of products?

A better way is to use preference information as a means of recording customer interests. While remaining customer driven, it allows marketer more freedom in terms of broadening communication types while making it easy for customers to manage their information.

Suppression
The next type of information is also commonly confused with permissions. As with permissions, customer suppression information limits the marketer’s communications with a customer. The difference is that suppression is applied at the discretion of the company. A simple— and hopefully uncommon—example of suppression in action would be a company that suppresses customers who sue them.

As with permissions changes and creation being governed by a company’s
privacy policy, the application of suppressions must be governed by a set of business rules that define when they are set. A best practice for suppression is determining when suppression may be applied and to define rules specific to each one.

Putting It to use

These three types of information— permissions, preferences and suppressions —provide the criticall foundation for controlling customer communications. With them, a marketer can both identify the customers with whom they may communicate and the topics in which those targets are interested.

When collected, stored and utilized in a structured, rules-based fashion, this is customer information that you can take to the bank.

by By Kevin Bishop