“Contactability”: the bridge between strategy and the customer

Retail, at its core, is a data-driven industry. Each transaction, visit, and interaction now leaves a trail – from sales volumes and basket sizes through to purchase frequencies, page views, opens, likes, and more. Every day, these signals help to shape decisions across marketing, commercial, sales, procurement, and beyond, and with good reason. Retailers that use this data to build mature communications and loyalty strategies can lift their annual sales by as much as 2.5% .

But transactional and behavioural insights in isolation are no longer enough. To turn strategy into meaningful action, retailers also require reliable contact data. Spotting a pattern or predicting behaviours means very little if you can’t actually engage with the person behind them. Simply, a healthy contact database is the foundation of a stronger, more powerful communication strategy.

It's with that in mind that I wanted to share four key ways in which retailers can improve the effectiveness of their “contactability” capabilities.

Four ways to enhance your customer contactability

1. Registration is vital – but it’s only the start
Your customer registration process can have an outsized impact on contactability – so getting it right is imperative. Fields should be clearly structured, and easy for customers to complete; overly long or detailed forms tend to increase abandonment rates, without necessarily delivering better insights. The data you choose to collect should also be relevant to the business and usable.

The same applies to other registration or psychographic data such as favourite sports team, lifestyle, or hobbies. But beware: almost any kind of datapoint can change over time. Basing communications on sensitive but inaccurate information – like marital status, profession, or pet ownership – can cause frustration and drive customers away. An effective registration process will get you off to a great start, but it is only a start.

2. Know what to validate and when
Defining which data points should be validated – and at what stage – is critical for ensuring both fluidity and quality. And this strategic decision should be driven by business strategy, not just technical capability. Assessing the communication mix, the weight of each channel, and the security processes involved in customer interactions is essential to determining how and when data should be validated.

If SMS or WhatsApp is the main communication channel, for instance, then validating the phone number with a real-time code is key. If it’s email, then email validation should be the priority. Moreover, phone and email data can also help to improve match rates in segmented social media campaigns, making their validation – even after initial registration – all the more vital.

3. Integrate data from multiple registration sources
Retailers often capture data across multiple touchpoints – app, website, physical store, call centre, etc. That can create discrepancies and raise doubts about consistency. Integrating these systems with unified validation processes, in terms of both data collection and updates, ensures greater security and efficiency in customer communications.

4. Update, update, and update again
A contact database is a living organism. Even with strong capture and validation processes in place, data quality is not guaranteed over time. Long-term health is dependent upon constant monitoring and action, and neglecting preventative updates is one of the most common reasons for failure.

Without regular updates, a database will quickly become outdated, campaign performance will drop, and reversing this decline will become increasingly expensive and time-consuming. Proactive initiatives and preventative update campaigns are the most effective ways to keep a database healthy.

The consequences of weak contactability

The negative impact of an outdated or poorly managed contact database goes beyond just marketing performance. At its worst, it can undermine engagement with customers, limit a retailer’s personalisation capabilities, and reduce its level of competitiveness. Inevitably, it can restrict media monetisation opportunities, too, something that can have a direct effect on commercial results.

In a landscape where personalisation is increasingly valued by consumers – and decisive for brand success – retailers that treat their contact database as a living asset will be far better positioned to build long-term relationships and deliver real value to shoppers. Integrity and freshness are the watchwords here, and even small adjustments to your contactability strategy can make a significant difference.