Inspire Brand Love: Never Miss Your Customers’ Birthdays
One of the easiest and friendliest ways to win your customers’ hearts is to present them with free birthday surprises. If you want customers to subscribe to your loyalty programs, you have to give them irresistible incentives.
I’m a huge fan of customer loyalty rewards programs. And some companies just get it. They don’t trick you. They keep their brand promises. They deliver 100 percent free birthday treats every year, without any hoops to jump through.
And that makes you feel like a valued customer.
Those little things matter. They make people feel warm and fuzzy. They get people to talk about your brand with their friends (I, for one, always tell my friends and family about these cool programs). They give customers something to look forward to. (Who doesn’t like free goodies?)
During my birthday month, I feel extra special because I get spoiled by a bunch of freebies from all the customer loyalty rewards programs I belong to. And now, I’m going to share my top picks with you and show you how to validate email addresses so you can confidently send birthday rewards to your customers.
My Favorite Customer Loyalty Rewards Programs with Awesome Birthday Bonuses
- Baskin Robbins
What’s a birthday without a sweet ice cream treat? Baskin Robbins knows how to delight customers on their birthdays! I signed up for their Birthday Club years ago, and I always look forward to my free scoop of ice cream and special discounts off their ice cream cakes.
The icing on top
There’s no catch—absolutely no purchase necessary to redeem your free birthday scoop! Now that’s how to properly frost your customer loyalty programs. Give your customers real gifts on their birthdays. With no strings attached. They’ll love you for it!
- Sephora Beauty Insider
Every birthday girl deserves to pamper herself on her birthday. Sephora glams you up with a free surprise cosmetic gift, sure to brighten your special day.
Shimmering sensation
Sephora knows how to dazzle its loyal customers with a birthday freebie. Every year, I look forward to scooping up my free gift (without having to buy something else to get it). Now that’s a beautiful thing!
- Rubio’s Beach Club
A complimentary meal for your birthday? A foodie’s dream come true! And Rubio’s serves up your favorite meal free, when you sign up for their Beach Club. Plus, members receive a free taco just for signing up. (Another yummy perk!)
Beach bum approved
No need to dip into your wallet to redeem your bodacious birthday meal. Rubio’s comps your meal (valued up to $7.99) so you can celebrate your birthday without spending a dime!
- Victoria’s Secret Pink Nation
To enhance your birthday suit, Victoria’s Secret Pink Nation gives you a $10 birthday gift card for a mini shopping spree (a sweet excuse for shopaholics to pick up something pretty).
Not-so-secret success
With over 11 million members, Pink Nation knows how to keep customers loyal and happy. They constantly send coupons for free goodies and discounts to encourage customers to come back to the store and shop. And it sure works!
Build Lifelong Customer Relationships
Acknowledging customer birthdays is the perfect chance to remind them they matter. It’s a very simple, yet highly personalized (and subtle) way to stay top of mind, while rewarding your customers for being loyal.
But before you can start showering your customers with free birthday treats, make sure their email addresses are valid and safe to send to.
Validating email addresses is an important step to take before entering customers into your loyalty programs because it helps:
- Reduce your email bounce rates
- Improve your email deliverability
- Protect you from spam traps
- Boost your campaign performance
- Increase customer engagement
How to use REV to validate email addresses for your customer loyalty programs
Note: To follow along, please sign up for a free trial of REV and a free trial of Informatica Data as a Service (DaaS).
Important: You’ll receive a registration confirmation email from DaaS with your username and password, as well as an activation link. REV will prompt you to enter these credentials to activate the email validation service.
Let’s get started!
After you sign up for a free trial of DaaS, follow these steps in REV to validate your customer email addresses:
- Log in to REV.
- Upload your customer email list. If you don’t have a list, open the “Sample Company Meeting” project (sample project included in the REV trial). (Note: The DaaS free trial gives you 100 API calls to test out the validation service.)
- Click the “email” header column. In the “Suggestions” panel, select “Validate as Email Address.”
- In the “Suggestions” panel, click “Highlight deliverable Email Addresses.”
Note: If this is the first time you’ve tried to validate email addresses in REV, you’ll see a pop-up window for Informatica Data as a Service. Enter your username and password provided in the Data as a Service registration confirmation email. Click “Connect.”
Using the DaaS API, REV validates each email address and shows you the Status Description, Reason Code, Reason Description, and Hygiene Result.
You can quickly identify which emails are valid, invalid, safe, and malicious. And why.
- To find all your valid email addresses, click the “Status Description” column header. In the “Value frequencies” tab, check the box next to “Email Valid.”
All done! Easy, right?
Validating email addresses in REV is especially helpful if you collect email addresses from in-store forms or customer events and you want to verify them before loading into your email or marketing database.
Get started today with a free trial and see how easy it is to validate your customer emails with REV.
Spending too much time prepping data? You’re not alone.
Analysts spend a disproportionate amount of their valuable time preparing, enriching, validating, and manipulating data.
To better understand the time distribution between data preparation and actual data analysis or other business initiatives requiring clean data, Blue Hill Research surveyed 186 data analysts and published the results in this benchmark report, “Quantifying the Case for Enhanced Data Preparation.” Read the full report to learn:
- Macro trends influencing data preparation challenges
- Time and cost savings achieved by using dedicated data preparation solutions
- Specific recommendations for boosting data analysts’ productivity
It’s Your Turn
What’s your favorite customer loyalty perk? How do you keep your customers loyal and happy? Do you validate emails for your customer loyalty programs? How often do you scrub your customer email lists?
Questions? Comments? Please share your thoughts in the Comments section below!
The post Data Prep 1, 2, 3: How to Validate Email Addresses for Customer Loyalty Programs appeared first on The Informatica Blog - Perspectives for the Data Ready Enterprise.