Everyone knows retailers collect information on their customers. Whether you go to a brick-and-mortar store or shop online, your personal information is sought after as an important marketing tool.
At the checkout line, your credit card swipe is stored in some giant database at the home office. You’re encouraged to take an online survey—the website is conveniently printed on your store receipt—with a promise of an extra discount or chance to win a shopping trip just for participating. The survey is just another chance to gather more information.
Online, well, you’re freely typing in all your personal information—your credit card information with the security code, with mailing and shipping details. No coaxing needed. You want the merchandise or service? You have to complete every line that has a red asterisk, or no sale.
The piece of information requested most often in a retail store is your zip code. You would think it was important for demographics; seeing where people come from and what they buy. There’s more to it than that. A Forbes article, “Never Give Stores Your Zip Code. Here’s Why,” reveals the real reason your zip code is the one piece of information stores want.
It’s true that stores and companies use the zip code for marketing purposes. If you’re vacationing, as was the author, you may not want a lot of flyers, sale brochures and emails from a store hundreds of miles away in a place you may never visit again. A polite “no” should be enough. The author tells the story of a woman who refused to give her zip code during a merchandise return, which prompted the store manager to lock the store and refuse to let her out until she revealed the five-digit number.
All this fuss over a zip code? Well, the zip code, it turns out, is the key that unlocks the rest of a customer’s personal information. Why do employees carefully look at your credit card and thank you by name? Because a customer’s name and zip code is the way retailers get the customer’s address, phone number, and any number of details about the customer that are valuable for marketing.
The direct marketing company, Harte-Hanks describes their GeoCapture service process. Capture the customer’s name during a transaction and ask the customer for his zip code. These two pieces of information allows GeoCapture’s database to find the customer’s address. They claim a 100% success rate.
A high-profile case involving Williams-Sonoma resulted in a court ruling in California that customers cannot be required to give zip code information to retailers. In this case, the customer thought the zip code was required to complete the transaction. In reality, it was used to match to a database to produce an address for marketing purposes.
All this data gathering costs money, and not all retailers are willing to spend it. There has to be a reasonable return on the investment. Data research to better understand the customer’s needs and preferences can make it worth the money in more sales. But who would have thought a five-digit number could be the cause for holding a customer hostage?
Photo Source: jannoon028 / Freedigitalphotos.net
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