Blog: The golden combination of personal information and address details

Data quality helps you, among other things, to communicate more relevantly and reach your customers. Many people know this. But how do you start? It's good to keep the following three questions in mind when dealing with data quality: who is my customer, where does my customer live, and how do I reach my customer? In a series of three blogs we focus each time on one question. Ideally you should be able to answer this question based on the customer data in your database.

In this blog we want to tackle the following question:  'where does my customer live?'

'Who is my customer?' was the main question of the first blog. You tackled this question by knowing the customer's name, gender, and age. This is the start of your 360-degree customer view and enables you to communicate more precisely and relevantly. It also helps in recognizing a customer, thus preventing fraud, misuse, and identity mix-ups.

The recognition of a customer works best when you can combine personal information with address details.

In the first blog, we referred to our data quality benchmark. There, we see that in 9% of cases, the residential address in the database does not exist, and 13% of customers in a database have already moved. Taken together, almost 1 in 4 customers is thus not reachable at the address available in the database. In a database of 500,000 customers, this means that 110,000 customers cannot receive letters, marketing actions, invoices, policies, or contracts. With confidential mail, this means a data breach. Initiating a debt collection process for example is also challenging without an address. But these aren’t even the most significant disadvantages, unlike the risks of identity fraud.

 And that problem is rapidly growing, especially because e-commerce has taken off so much. It's becoming more common and the costs are often incalculable. And this applies not only to webshops but to every company.

The combination of personal and address information is has huge value.

 Besides reaching and recognizing customers, there's much more potential with the combi of personal data and addresses. One of the interesting yet underutilized possibilities is customer profiling. With the combination of address and personal details, you're much better equipped to achieve that 360-degree customer view. It provides insight into the city a customer resides in and even more specifically into which neighborhood, street, and address. Utilizing national segmentation data like GeoMarktprofiel further enhances your ability to gain information about customers, such as their living environment, type of residence, and household specifics. Moreover, using GeoTypes, you can segment your customer portfolio into various lifestyle segments, providing immediate answers to questions like which customer segments are under- or overrepresented. Consequently, you can run campaigns much more effectively with a message, tone-of-voice, images, and offers that resonate with customers in the respective segment. But that's not all. It also provides guidance in qualifying potential new customers and mapping the market potential, determining, for instance, the best location for opening a new branch.

'The golden combination of personal information and address details' is the title of this blog. This is the second, most crucial step towards working to achieve a 360-degree customer view. With the right address, your Direct Marketing becomes more effective, ensuring essential customer communication by post always reaches its destination. Furthermore, the address grants access to a wealth of information, but more importantly, it allows you to segment and profile. You communicate more relevantly, improve conversion rates, and, you're able to recognize your customers.

Additionally, organizations have an obligation to keep their customer data up-to-date. The GDPR specifies what organizations must do to ensure the quality of customer data: "Personal data must be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; all reasonable measures must be taken to erase or rectify promptly personal data that are inaccurate in relation to the purposes for which they are processed."

Would you like to know more about data quality? Read the first blog of this series or visit our website for more background information. Interested in learning more about the link with GeoMarktprofiel? Let us know in a non-committal conversation. We're here to assist you further!