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A niche ad agency serving fitness clubs was spending acquisition budget on people who were already paying members. FullContact resolved their client CRMs inside Snowflake, made the member file addressable to their DSP, and turned it into a suppression list.
Results at a Glance
- 36% advertising spend and margin efficiency
- 40% of existing members identified as illegitimate
- 25% additional members identified as duplicates
- Client onboarding reduced from days to hours
The Challenge
The agency’s clients ran introductory offers to win new gym members. Those offers were reaching people who had already joined and were already paying full price. Every existing member who redeemed a new member discount was margin the club had already earned and then gave back.
Fixing that requires knowing, with confidence, who is already a member of which club. That is harder than it sounds. Member data sits in separate CRMs, one per client. The same person appears as a postal record in one system and an email record in another, with no shared key between them. Sign up forms accumulate duplicates and junk entries. And even a clean member list is not usable by an ad platform, which needs hashed identifiers rather than names and addresses.
The agency had a second problem running alongside the first. Onboarding a new client took days, which limited how many clients they could take on and how quickly a new engagement could start producing results.
The Approach
- Resolve the client CRMs. FullContact unified postal and email identities across each client’s systems, mapped records to individual club members, and surfaced duplicate and fake records in the process.
- Make the member file addressable. Media Amplification appended hashed emails and mobile advertising IDs to the consolidated dataset. That turned a member list into something the agency’s demand side platform could match against, and therefore suppress.
- Deploy inside Snowflake. The solution ran in the agency’s Snowflake environment rather than moving data out to a separate processing step. Large onboarding batches dropped from days to hours.
The Results
FullContact recognized 40% of the existing members as illegitimate and an additional 25% as duplicate members, giving the agency an accurate account of who its clients’ club members actually were.
With hashed emails and mobile advertising IDs appended, the agency could push those members to its DSP as a suppression audience. New member offers stopped serving to people who were already members.
Suppressing existing club members from new member offers created a 36% advertising spend and margin efficiency. Running the solution inside Snowflake cut client onboarding from days to hours.
Where This Applies
This pattern shows up anywhere acquisition offers and an existing customer base share the same advertising channels. Subscription services, telecom, insurance, retail loyalty programs, and any business running a new customer discount all face the same failure mode: the ad platform has no idea who is already a customer, so it serves the offer to whoever looks like a good prospect, including the people already paying.
The fix is the same in each case. Resolve the customer file so you know who is genuinely in it, append the identifiers the ad platform can actually match on, and suppress. The efficiency gain comes from the budget you stop wasting, not from better targeting.
Next Steps
Talk to us about using omnichannel identity resolution and suppressing existing customers from your acquisition campaigns.
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