Do your customers think you’re incompetent? They might.
You get an email that says “please sign up for our webinar” — or conference, or online forum, or whatever it is. You sign up. Then you keep getting emails asking you to sign up. You think, “don’t these people know to suppress their campaigns against the people who have already said yes?”
Maybe they do, but maybe they’re only suppressing the email address you used when you signed up, and they have another one for you in the system.
This illustrates a situation where you need to suppress against the person, not against the identifier. (In this case, the identifier is email address.)
That’s not always the case. In some situations you want to suppress one email address but not another.
Managing this correctly requires two things.
- You need to be aware of the issue.
- You need the tools to handle it.
That is, you need to be able to suppress at multiple different levels by different types of identifiers or groups (like person, household, or company).
That’s the basics. Here are some illustrations of when you might need to do one or the other.
The unsubscribe that didn’t
A customer unsubscribes from your marketing emails to their gmail account, but they also have a work address in your system. That one keeps getting emails.
From your point of view, you followed the rules. From their point of view, …. Well, it’s not clear what they wanted. Maybe they want to get the emails at one address and not the other, or maybe they don’t want to hear from you at all. (Remember, you want people to unsubscribe rather than mark you as spam!)
The best solution here is to make this clear on the unsubscribe page. Allow them to manage the email preferences for all their addresses, if you can.
To do that you need an integration between your email service provider and a database that matches the customer to the email address. A customer data platform or a CRM could do that, but other tools might work as well.
If you can’t offer that level of service, you can at least spell it out on the unsubscribe page. E.g., This change only applies to this email address. Sure, that’s obvious to you, but that’s because eat and drink this stuff every day.
“Quit chasing me with products I’ve already purchased!”
We’ve all had the experience. We search for a product and buy it, then we’re followed for a month by ads for the product that’s long since been safely delivered to our front porch. Many people find that annoying.
You can’t eliminate every annoying part of retargeting campaigns, but you can make it smarter if you suppress the campaign against the person and not simply the email address, device, or cookie.
Oh, that’s on another support ticket
A customer starts a support case using one email, then follows up using another. Your CRM logs this as two separate people because it uses email address as the unique identifier. The result is confusion and a frustrated customer. Your tools are making you look incompetent.
Consent management
A user declines tracking on your website, but you’re still collecting behavioral data on your mobile site because the consent decision was tied to a device ID or a cookie — not to the individual.
This is a hard one to solve. No matter what the CDP salesman tells you, you can’t always connect a user on desktop site to a user on a mobile app. Or even to a user on one of your other websites! (You can if you have a common login!)
As with the unsubscribe example above, it’s probably best to make this explicit on the consent screen.
Conclusion
Sometimes, it’s appropriate to treat different email addresses as separate contacts, especially in B2B or shared device situations. But often, if you’re trying to respect customer intent, avoid repetition, or understand the full customer journey, you need to unify identities and act on the person level, not just the attribute or device level.
Part of the problem is that consumers believe — often wrongly, but they still believe it — that you have all kinds of information about them, and that you could fix these problems if you tried harder.
You’ll never get it perfect, but you need to embrace that challenge and do the best you can with what you’ve got.
If you need help, give me a call!
