Web Server Identifying your Customers by their Email Addresses

Posted by arlene

Having a unique identifier (UID) to identify a customer across multiple databases is an important—and frequently overlooked—concept. In the traditional world of direct marketing, a combination of name and address, and sometimes telephone number, is normally used to uniquely identify each customer. But because of the likelihood of misspelling names and transposing numbers, this approach is often less than accurate.

Because a customer generally remembers his own email address, that address can be linked with the UID in the database and used as a sign-on name for the customer, thus making it easier to maintain and track customer information over time. When designing a customer sign-on process, it’s a good idea to suggest to users that they use their email address as their sign-on ID or user name. If you ask them to make up a user name, they’ll quickly forget it. When this happens, the user will send you an email, call your 800 support number, reregister with a new user name, or disengage altogether, all of which costs you money.

A relatively small number of users share their email addresses with other members of their household, and this presents something of a challenge. To differentiate and support multiple members of a shared-address household, some customers may need to identify themselves through a combination of email address and user name, normally the user’s first name. Whether you create customer profiles based on households or individual users will depend entirely on the objectives of your email marketing program, but in general, it’s unlikely that you’ll need to worry about this problem.

Does Everything need to be in one place?

“To data warehouse or not to data warehouse” is a question that more and more companies are trying to answer. A data warehouse is a centralized collection of data. Its goal is normally to gather all the data that exists within your organization into one database, effectively becoming a central repository for data about customers, products, and transactions (potentially spanning all the company’s divisions and products). The promise of a functioning data warehouse is phenomenal. It may enable you to put together a complete view of all customer activity in all channels. It should enable to you look at a history of product sales and cross-tabulate the sales history against customer information such as age, location, gender, or any other information that exists in the warehouse. Because no organization runs all its operations from a single database, the data warehouse also acts as a central clearinghouse, receiving and processing information from all the company’s other databases and sending information out to them as well. As you may expect, building a data warehouse is a significant undertaking for any organization, small or large, but because of the scale of these projects, I have witnessed very few successful data warehouse initiatives. They always seem to be “under development” by the information technology department.

Does your organization need a data warehouse to develop an effective email marketing program? Not at all. A common mistake is for marketers to wait for the completion of a centralized data warehouse project before they move forward on data-driven marketing initiatives. I was recently speaking to a high-flying Internet start-up (which shall go unnamed) in the consumer retailing space. The company was very well capitalized, had aggressive plans to rapidly build a large customer base, and its initial focus was—as it should be—on new customer acquisition. We were discussing how to initiate an email marketing program that would support its acquisition program and enable it to establish an email-based dialogue with early customers and site visitors.

The marketing side of the business was very eager to get the ball rolling, but discussions broke down over the data warehouse effort.

The technical side of the business was convinced that it needed a data warehouse and that no email marketing programs should be developed until this effort was complete. This is a major mistake, one which I predicted would keep it from initiating an email marketing program for at least 18 months. In fact, its IT efforts so slowed it down that the company was months late launching its site, did just over $1 million in revenue, and then filed for bankrupcy protection.

A well-designed data warehouse can provide a rich source of data to draw from when developing your customer model, and it may expedite the development of a comprehensive, information- intensive email marketing program, but it is by no means a requirement. Building a data warehouse is a large, complex, and expensive undertaking. It is usually driven by the information technology side of a business and must support a broad range of departments other than marketing. Unfortunately, it is beyond this topic to discuss the various types of commonly used data warehouse designs and architectures.

Data warehouses are also notorious for having all the right information but giving little or no practical or useful access to it. Most data warehouses, for example, are not designed to support real-time transactions and therefore will not provide the operational foundation for an integrated email marketing program.

 

The Email Marketing Data Mart

Whether you decide to embark on a data warehouse project or not, if you’re going to implement an email marketing program you will need to develop a data mart, which is a specialized database designed to support specific functions or applications. Data marts differ from data warehouses in that they are both special-purpose and transactional. They are special-purpose because they are designed to house only the data that is required to support the application they are being designed for. (In contrast, a data warehouse contains data for the entire corporation.) For instance, a marketing data mart will normally house data useful for understanding customer behavior. It will segment and target customers based on their demographic and self-reported profiles, past purchase history, and even elements of their customer service history. It will not contain such information as product specifications, shipping address, and credit card number. They are transactional because they are designed so the data can be used in real-time to drive such transactions as sending personalized email or generating detailed reports.

As was discussed earlier, the data that makes up the data mart is collected from any number of internal and external sources (possibly including the data warehouse). Having a well-designed data warehouse in place when you design and implement an email marketing data mart may make it easier to compile the information you need, but it’s not at all necessary. An email marketing data mart can simply connect to a collection of databases—such as those used for registration, customer service, web-tracking, and commerce—to pull together the requisite information needed to support your email marketing programs. All the information in an email marketing data mart must be easily accessible and actionable, both for driving individualized email communication and for pulling reports in real-time.

Accessing Customers Data in a world of Real-Time Expectations

If I register for an email service or make a purchase on a website I expect to receive a confirmation right away—and I’m not alone. Online consumers everywhere increasingly expect to receive immediate responses to their actions. Anything else is seen as a possible problem and could undermine my confidence in the company I’m interacting with. But in order to send out that instant welcome message or purchase confirmation, the marketer must receive the data— in real-time—on what I signed up for or purchased.

Consumers also expect to be able to examine and modify their personal profiles at any time. This means that the same data that drives email targeting and personalization must be available—again, in real-time—to the customer to whom it belongs. Customers expect that the changes they make to their profiles will take effect instantly. If I unsubscribe or change my address now, it isn’t good enough that. you update your database 24 hours later—especially if you deliver me an email reflecting my old profile in the meantime.

Just as consumers expect real-time action and reaction from the companies they communicate with online, marketers are demanding almost instant results from their email marketing efforts. Because 90 percent of responses to an email campaign typically come within 48 hours, it’s very possible to get a sense of whether a campaign is going to work as expected within hours after the first emails are sent out.

Of course, not all data needs to be updated in real time. When you design your customer model it is important to consider what information really does need constant updating and what can be transferred into your email marketing database in batch mode at less frequent intervals. If you send out email from your marketing system only every night at midnight, there is no real reason to update the information in the marketing data mart more than once a day. But if you deliver all of your customer emails, including such real-time communications as purchase confirmations, through the same “communications gateway,” the data indicating that a new purchase was made probably needs to be appended to a customer’s profile within minutes of the purchase.

As time goes on, consumers and marketers alike will expect more and more of their transactional information to be available in real-time. Your challenge, then, is to keep your various data sources synchronized and updated in a way that supports your customers‘ expectations as well as your own communication needs.

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