Recipe: Manage Deceased Customer Records for Accurate and Considerate Communication

# Customer lists

# Data hygiene

# Communicate with your customers

# Recipes for success

# Recipes for Success

Makes: A system for tracking and managing records of deceased customers

Keeping track of deceased customers in your system helps you avoid spending budget on mailings or email campaigns that will never be opened, and prevents the discomfort of a bereaved family receiving fundraising asks or marketing addressed to someone who has passed away

By tagging deceased patrons and building a Global Segment, you can automatically exclude them from Customer Lists, giving you cleaner engagement metrics that accurately reflect your active audience. You can also use this segment to power a Customer Group and flag deceased customers in the Sales and Opportunities Interfaces

What you need

Admin Interface access

Sales Interface access

Insights & Mailings Interface access

Opportunities Interface access (optional)

Time required

5 minutes initial setup and minor continuous maintenance

What will this help me achieve?

Prevent marketing or fundraising communications from reaching the families of deceased customers

Reduce wasted spend on postage or email sends that will never convert

Maintain accurate email engagement rates by removing customers who will never open or click

Purposefully include or exclude deceased customers from Customer Lists and reports

Concepts we’ll be using

Normal tags: Labels which are manually added to and removed from a Customer Record to keep your segmentation up to date

Deactivating a Customer Record: Prevent deceased customers from automatically being included in Customer Lists and stop them from displaying in Sales Interface searches.

Global Segments: Group customers into segments which are available to re-use across multiple customer lists.

Prep

Decide which tag group will hold your deceased patron tag. If you have an existing group that's a good fit use that one, otherwise, create a new one.

Create a manual tag in that group named something clear and consistent, such as "Deceased."

Create a Global Segment (Customer Type) that groups everyone with this tag. Name it something short and recognisable such as "Deceased”. You’ll want it to be clear and recognisable to everyone at your organisation.

Activate

When you become aware of a customer who is deceased, search for their record in the Sales Interface.

Manually apply the “Deceased” tag to their account.

Deactivate their Spektrix account and their online account.

Utilise your global “Has Deceased customer Tag” segment to exclude or include these customers from your customer lists as needed.

Consider using your new tag in a global segment to exclude deceased customers and any other groups of customers you want to exclude from your future mailings, such as those who have said “No” to email or have no email address.

More to explore

With your process in place for recognising deceased customers in your system, you'll be able to better track the accuracy of your email engagement and reduce wasted spend on communication sends that will never convert.

Forum Discussion on the Community : York Theatre Royal asked other Spektrix organizations how they handle deceased Customer Records in their systems and received some excellent answers from the Community.

System Efficiencies: Analysing your data : Cleaning your data and making your system as efficient as possible is a great thing to do, and this is especially true if you have been using Spektrix for a number of years. Use this Support Centre article as a launch pad toward improved system health.

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