Even the most sophisticated retention schemes risk failing when customers move

By Richard Anderson, Sales Manager

Over the past few years increasing amounts of marketers have recognised that as well as the constant drive to acquire new customers, it is even more important to retain existing ones.
This is why the companies (that can), literally spend millions on sophisticated customer loyalty programmes and use them to provide existing customers with more value through a bespoke collection of offers and incentives. The buzz words “customer centric” came to the fore.
But however intelligent an approach, what can’t be avoided is the natural churn of customers moving house and failing to inform every company they have ever purchased from.
“Most of our customers let us know they have moved” we hear time and time again.
It just doesn’t wash with me. When I moved, I told my bank, my telecoms provider, my digital TV provider, the usual utilities - and that was about it. The others I got around to when I placed an order from my new address – and this included my supermarket loyalty card.
The removal of goneaways is now a given for most direct mailers– so why not continue the natural process and obtain the customer’s new address at the same time? That way you can continue a relevant dialogue with your customer, without interruption, and are less likely to lose them.
As well as telling you where your existing customer has gone, GAS Reactive is so accurate that in most cases it will provide the name of the new occupier too. This will enable you to strike up a conversation with a new prospect that is likely to meet your customer profile.
So even when your customer moves and doesn’t tell you, GAS Reactive ensures that the customer chain remains unbroken. It avoids the additional cost of re-acquiring that individual as a cold prospect and saves you the uncertainty of matching them with their assumed purchase history.
Suddenly, those clever loyalty programmes can appear even more logical – send Mrs Jones (No1 customer from Hartlepool) relevant incentives as an existing customer at her new address, rather than a generic offer for nappies or cat food when she doesn’t have children or pets.
100% retention might never be reached, but the best result will come from deploying multiple strategies and at the hub of these should be the use of accurate data-based tools to apply fresh intelligence to decaying data.