We have talked to multiple marketers who want to be able to reach more of their loyalty program members via direct mail. Email is their current primary tactic due to low outbound cost and emphasis is placed on each store gathering email addresses at sign-up both in the store and online.
However, we all know a lot of customers don’t open their email. It’s not unusual for open rates to range between 11 and 25% on loyalty programs. That means 75-89% of customers aren’t opening your emails or they furnished an invalid address to qualify for a discount.
Your customer transaction value or lifetime value will drive the business case on which individuals or segments make sense to target via direct mail. If it makes sense, the challenge we see many marketers facing is this simple fact: they don’t have physical addresses on millions of their customers.
At the time of sign-up, it may have seemed intrusive to ask the new customer for too much info. That’s valid. You’re happy to get the email.
We’re hearing this frequently. I want to mail to my customers, but I don’t have addresses. What can we do? Here are a few ways to fix this:
- Do you have an ecommerce business? Are shipping addresses or billing addresses being migrated from the ecommerce database to the CRM database? We see a lot of siloed data.
- Offer an incentive to provide physical address info at sign-up. Utilize a bounce back coupon, with serialization so they aren’t abused. When a person signs up, offer them a discount on their next purchase if they volunteer their address.
- Offer an incentive to existing customers to do the same. Can your POS system flag people for who you have no physical address so the associate can present the offer? If not, check with the IT department to see if it can be implemented.
- In your emails to customers, insert a variable offer for those with no physical address.
- Reverse address append. Some of the major data providers, given an email or phone number, can append a physical address. We see match rates run from about 17% – 40%. PrintComm can help with this.
The other big issue
Marketers also find that many of their acquisition mailings are going to current customers. Why? Because without a physical address, they can’t be suppressed from the mailing. There is a big hidden cost here. Prospect offers are typically very generous. Without a robust suppression file, margin is being given away. This alone creates a powerful business case for spending the money to implement any of the approaches above.
If you want to chat more about this, feel free to reach out to our team.
