The Importance of Repermissioning Your Data

Post-GDPR, every brand’s customer database had a view of what they deemed permissioned for contact. Over time, however, we’ve seen brands become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of customer data they hold, what they can use it for, and even whether they are allowed to use it at all. The result is that brands often do nothing when it comes to marketing to their customers, rather than risk doing the wrong thing.

Of course, the length of time consumers are retained in a database(s) depends on the products or services and permissions they were initially onboarded with. For example, a customer who purchased a new sofa may be retained by a sofa retailer for far longer than a clothing or supermarket retailer, as the life of a sofa is much longer than that of clothes or a grocery shop.

Why re-permission?

Where contactable permissions may have lapsed, it’s not as straightforward as contacting these consumers and attempting to start a relationship again. Permissions require review to establish if and how these consumers can be contacted and re-engaged. This is where re-permissioning comes in.

Email remains one of the most effective ways to market to customers, but the permission to use email as a contact channel involves understanding both UK GDPR and the Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulation. Re-permissioning data is a process by which brands can be added to fair processing notices and customers’ permission re-captured on their behalf by data marketing organisations like Sagacity. The permission must be regenerated in order for the brand to match it, enabling brands to re-engage with lapsed customers by capturing their permission to re-engage via this process.

Retention is key and, of course, far more cost effective than acquiring new customers, especially for organisations such as retailers. For insurance providers, being able to identify customers with lapsed policies, particularly for insurance products like travel insurance and life insurance which consumers are more likely to take up around a milestone (age) or an event (such as a holiday), re-engaging them with personalised content and promotions is much more effective – both in terms of marketing and ROI – than prospecting new ones. According to some studies, acquiring a new customer can cost five to seven times more than retaining an old one. For those in financial services, re-permissioning also fulfils legal requirements – such as pensioners legally needing to be contactable.

Additional benefits and uses

Re-permissioning enables brands to implement an additional offshoot focus to address missing email addresses in their customer data. Supermarket retailers can utilise loyalty cards to package relevant comms to target consumers now having confirmed their email address, encouraging both online and offline purchasing irrespective of the loyalty card.

And re-engaging a customer can also enable a brand to enhance and maximise their customer data, providing improvements in engageability and ensuring they are talking to them in the most effective way possible thanks to a greater understanding of their demographic. And of course, there is a financial benefit in not targeting people that are no longer there, and operating from a fully cleansed and fully permissioned customer database.

The process

Firstly, Sagacity captures emails for the brand by adding the brand to its fair processing notices and capturing the correct level of permission for the brand, which in turn aligns with the principles and transparency elements required by UK GDPR and PECR, and sets a reasonable expectation with the customer on how their data will be processed i.e. clear, open and honest. Once re-permissioned emails have been captured, these can be matched to the customer database to identify who can be retargeted. These communications can be personalised with the help of Sagacity’s Prospect database, a B2C database solution for prospect data that is the UK's most comprehensive consumer marketing database.

If Sagacity captures permission to contact, the brand is able to reach out to the customer with a cold piece of marketing, but thanks to Sagacity’s knowledge and consumer affinity there is an increased likelihood of response. The brand can then craft a comms plan to generate the consumer’s direct consent with the brand moving forward.

But re-permissioning can be cleverer and model beyond just prospect matching. It can also model and score a lapsed customer base based on lookalike customer,s depending on the volume and client's objectives.

The flow of re-permissioning works as follows:

1. Analysis of all relevant customer records by Sagacity’s Data Quality & Governance Lead

2. A full permissions review (usually in the form of a workshop) to establish current permissions and existing data opportunities, including:

• What data is held, how it was collected, when was it collected, what permission (lawful basis) is being used to process the data and to understand what audit trails exist
• The overall quality of the data
• Review of records for deceased and or a goneaway status
• What stop files or suppressions are currently held by the Brand
• Current erasure and retention rules which are applied to the data
• The use of Sagacity’s data and permissions to append customer detail
• Establish how customers can be contacted, e.g. email, mail, SMS, social media, and/or phone

3. An overview of strategy for re-permissioned and re-contactable customers delivered back to the business

Improve your data with repermissioning

Re-permissioning not only enables lapsed customers to be re-engaged, but also opportunities to enrich existing data, and to ensure that data is clean, accurate and complete. More cost-effective than acquiring new customers, thus solving the “leaky bucket” issue, it is an effectual and fully UK GDPR-compliant method to re-engage customers responsibly.

Interested in learning more about re-permissioning your customers? Contact our team today.

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