Contacts
A contact is someone you can contact by email, text message or direct mail. Think of these as leads you are trying to convert to customers (note a contact may already be an anonymous buyer). Depending on your integration, contacts are added to the Clutch database automatically when a person signs up for an email or text messaging list, or manually through the Virtual Terminal’s Add Contacts form. There is no transactional information available about a contact until the contact converts to an identified customer. When a contact makes a purchase and “identifies” themselves, Clutch records this purchase (and all future purchases) thus completing the conversion from contact to identified customer. When a contact converts to an identified customer or enrolls in your loyalty program the contact’s communication history is saved as part of their customer journey.
Customers
A customer is defined as someone who has made a purchase from your brand or enrolled in your loyalty program. The different subsets of your customers are defined below.
Anonymous Customers
These are the customers behind your anonymous transactions. You may or may not be sending these transactions to Clutch, it will depend on your integration.
Identified Customers
A customer is “identified” if they provide some identifying information when making a purchase. For example, a customer might enter their email during an e-commerce checkout or provide their phone number or rewards card to the clerk at the point of sale. Identified customers are issued a customer ID or card number in the Clutch database and all their purchases are recorded (assuming the customer identifies themselves each time). Depending on your integration, identified customers may choose to enroll in your loyalty program at a later date or they may be enrolled automatically during the identification process.
Members
These customers are officially enrolled in your loyalty program (and therefore identified). They have met the enrollment requirements and an enrollment date has been set on their profile. In the Clutch Segmentation tool you can build a segment of these customers by adding a filter where Enrolled = true. If you do not have a loyalty program, you will not have any enrolled customers.
What do we know about the contact or customer?
How can we interact with the contact or customer?
