Wouldn’t it be great if you could clone your best customers? That scenario is probably best left to science fiction writers, but there are some high tech tools that can help you find new customers who behave remarkably like your current top customers. Better still, they can help you hold on to and grow the customer relationships you have.
How well do you really know your customers?
Think about your top five customers right now. You know your customers’ names. You can probably look up their addresses. You know what they buy from you, how much they spend, and how often they purchase.
But do you know why they buy from you and not your competitor? Do you in fact know that they DON’T buy from your competitor? Do you know how your customers feel about current events? What their favorite pastimes are? What worries them?
Discover a rich, new vein of customer information.
Opportunities for learning more about your customers–and finding similar prospects– through data-driven segmentation are evolving. It’s long been possible to target customers by geographic segmentation (urban, suburban, rural address) and by demographic segmentation (age, income, ethnicity, etc.). But today’s technology provides opportunities to model your current customers in greater detail, which can give you a competitive edge both in targeting like prospects and in retaining and growing current customer relationships. These modeling methods include:
Psychographic segmentation: lifecycle, lifestyle, activities, interests, opinions, attitudes, values, political affiliations, preferred communication channels. (Will an email, direct mail piece or incorporating a PURL–(personalized URL)–get the response you want?)
Behavioral segmentation: behavior toward products, benefits sought, usage rate, brand loyalty, readiness to buy, occasions that stimulate purchase (such as holidays or birthdays).
Online behavioral segmentation: capture of specific, defined online behaviors that can be appended to mailing lists to further differentiate customer behavior patterns.
Turn that gold into profits.
Once you have a list with segmentation appropriate for your product or service, you can create tailored and relevant messaging for each segment. And with eDM and some forms of DM, you can change copy and images economically for each segment, or even each individual, for true one-on-one marketing. The result?
1. Higher profits from existing customers
2. Lower costs to attract new customers
3. Higher return on marketing campaigns
4. Improved retention and less churn
The year is young…why not investigate smarter, more affordable marketing tools in 2009.
