Effective Strategies for Collecting Customer Data

Introduction

Today, data is all around us. There is data in every digital interaction from your mobile devices to the websites you visit to all of the myriad smart devices in your home. The foundation of an effective retention marketing program with your customers is built on sound principles in collecting this data and making sense of it. Data is just data until you can implement effective strategies in analyzing and using it to benefit both your company and your customers.

In 2006, Data Scientist Clive Humby said “Data is the new oil”. The raw data that is collected isn’t valuable just like oil; and like oil, data has to be refined and fixed to make it usable. It only becomes valuable when teams and organizations can analyze large amounts of data that create meaningful personalized customer experiences across every online and offline interaction.

"Data is the New Oil"

Having an effective Data Strategy for customer data distills down to 3 key processes, which we’ll call the 3 C’s of data management.

1. Collection
2. Capture
3. Cleansing

Data Collection Starts Immediately

The moment a potential customer lands on your website or downloads your app for the first time, your company will start collecting data on that user. Throughout his or her journey with your company, your teams will begin to create a model of this potential customer before they make a purchase or provide some information. Some of the information you’ll know about this person will be:

1. User behaviors on certain pages of your website – are they browsing some products more than others?
2. Products the user might have already added to their cart for purchase
3. Device information – you’ll know what kind of device they’re using; if it’s mobile or desktop. What kind of browser and operating system are they using.
4. Location data – you’ll know the general or specific location of the user based on their location data or be able to locate it through their IP address

Based on some of the data points above, before the user even provides you with their email address or phone number, your teams can automatically start creating a profile of this person. The majority of websites online capture this type of user event data in Google Analytics but private information about the user is hidden from view in their platform. Other analytics platforms such as Amplitude and Heap capture a lot of event information such as page views, scroll and click events at the user level and they make all of this data available to send back to your data warehouse. This data can be really valuable in the future when you’re creating highly personalized customer segments.

Here is a small sample of what the data might look like on these platforms. Here's the full example of the JSON payload that would might be captured.

This wealth of information can be stitched by your team of Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Data Analysts to personalize the online experience of your customers.

Email Submissions

1. Email Address Format
   • validate the email address being submitted follows the format of username@domain.com
2. Domain Validation – validate that the domain being captured is real. @gmail.com is correct; @gmal.com and @gmil.com are not valid email domains
3. Fix domains – in addition to validating the domains, if incorrect domains slip by, fix them.
4. Double Opt-In - Implement the extra process of double opt-in with your email submissions. When someone submits their email address to their email list or provides an email address at the time of purchase, require customers to click on a verification link confirming their email submission.

Phone Numbers

1. Phone Number Format – validate the phone numbers being captured. Here in the US, make sure all phone numbers being captured have area codes followed by a seven-digit number
2. Double Opt-In – Institute a double opt-in to all of your phone number submissions where a user will get SMS/Text messages.

Home Addresses

Validate that the home address that a customer is entering in is valid. When a home address is being captured, there’s a high likelihood it is valid when it’s attached to a purchase when the purchase is being made with a credit card. In the instances where it’s not a purchase, use third-party services such as Smarty or Melissa to validate addresses.

Collaborate with your Product and Engineering teams to institute these processes. They are run-of-the-mill and could be mundane but your retention marketing program will really benefit from it in the long term.

Data Cleansing and Scrubbing

In addition to data collection and data capture, one of the key steps in maintaining good data is ongoing data cleansing and scrubbing. We recommend some of the following processes to implement:

1. Set of Standards – Set up consistent standards and protocols to check your data against
2. Scrub duplicates from your database – remove unnecessary duplicates from your database. Each customer should have only one record. Merge and unify customer data to avoid confusion about where a single source of truth is for a customer record.
3. NCOA – as your customer database grows over time, a number of your customers will move to different locations, which creates stale mailing address data. Consider implementing an ongoing process with the National Change Of Address (NCOA) regularly to keep your customer data updated. The NCOALink is a service maintained by the US Postal Service, which provides a secure data set of 160 million permanent change of address records from individuals and businesses.

Final Thoughts

We hope this helped provide some insights into implementing effective strategies for collecting customer data. Collecting data at every interaction, capturing the right data, and constantly cleansing and scrubbing will help to ensure your organization’s data will always be in its most optimal state.