To truly understand your customers get their address, not their postcode.

Many, if not most, businesses have no idea where their customers live. If truth be known, most of them don’t care. Well, maybe they care a bit, but most just don’t want to be bothered in the hassle and effort to find out. This is a real lost opportunity. Without this basic knowledge of your customers’ address you are not in a position to start the process of knowing your best customers and the ability to find more of them.

Outside of going through the hassle of setting up and maintaining a loyalty program (and we will discuss at another time why this is such an important part of any consumer facing organisation’s toolkit) Many businesses only record, if they do anything at all, the postcode of residence.

As the map below shows, postcodes cover a lot of territory. The area shown is the region around Sydney Kingsford Smith airport. Notice how large, for example, the postcode that includes Maroubra is, stretching from the coast all the way to the edge of the airport.

Now look at the same map, this time with the SA1 geography overlaid.

There are 78 SA1s in postcode 2035. An SA1 is the delightful name that the ABS has given to the smallest area for which the full set of Census data is available. They average about 150 households. So, it is small enough to be representative of the people who live there.

To give you some idea as to what difference an address can make, look at the two pictures below, which are about 150 metres apart.

One of the areas is full of units, while the other is single family detached dwellings. They live a stone’s throw away from each other, but their lives are very different. Treating these two areas the same misses so many of the nuances and variables that go into your customer’s decision-making.

We’ll discuss more about the differences in the next post.