13 Jan Is your marketing strategy targeting the right customers with the wrong incentives?

Acquiring a new customer is just the start. It’s how you respond to them post purchase that will determine their loyalty to your brand. When a customer purchases from you again and again, the data captured gives a powerful insight into the customers purchase and behavioural patterns. Marketers should be leveraging this data to help them understand their customers better. We discussed this topic in our recent article ‘how to make the most of your customer data’. 

Identify the right customers on your database, by ‘right customers’, we’re referring to your most profitable customers, the customers who can genuinely help you grow your brand. These are your loyal customers, or customers who shop with a predictable frequency and average purchase value. 

So, do your marketing strategy incentives differ for this valuable group of customers, or are they entitled to the same as everyone else?

Understand your customers’ behaviour

As we’ve said several times – no customer is equal. The same incentive or value add will not be received in the same way for everyone. No, you need to take time to understand the customers behaviour, and what they would value. 

Unfortunately, even in today’s world of ever increasing customer expectations, brands are still sending out blanket emails to their entire customer base without taking the time to look at the customer’s purchase history, or even basic demographics (often assuming that they technology they have in place will solve this problem for them). This has a huge impact on marketing communications. Customers are not receiving the hyper-personalised messages and incentives that they now expect. A study by ActiveTrail¹ found that 52% of customers will shop elsewhere if the marketing emails they receive are not personalised.

Incentives are designed to bring customers back in store, to thank and retain their loyalty. By dedicating more time to effective customer segmentation you’ll learn more about your customers and the kind of incentives they would welcome. In doing so, you’ll receive a much larger return on investment.

Customer value segments

Customer data can help you segment your customers into different value groups. This can be very simple such as High Value, Mid-Range Value and Low Value. 

High Value Customers – the focus for this group should be to up-sell products or services.

Mid-Range Customers – the focus for this group should be to up-sell and increase the frequency of purchases

Low Value Customers – the focus for this group should be to increase the frequency of purchases

Your offer aggressiveness should be completely different across these different value segments and targeted to achieve the specific goals within that segment.

Reward the behaviour you want to influence

Once you have your customer value segments, you can begin rewarding the type of behaviour that you want to influence. Let’s bring this to life with an example:

A customer visits a beauty salon on a regular basis for a manicure and pedicure. Therefore offering this customer a discount on these treatments is counter intuitive as all it does is erode margin. They are happy to pay for the treatments and have proven loyal with the frequency that they return. Instead, the beauty salon can offer a discount for an alternative treatment, i.e. massage, facial, waxing etc. They could also offer a referral reward, if the customer brings a friend along for a treatment then they receive some form of incentive. This also brings a potential new customer into the beauty salon, they have the opportunity to offer an incentivise this customer to return.

Summary

Many brands are not dedicating enough time to their marketing communication strategy, particularly when it comes to customer segmentation. There is no one size fits all. Sending the same incentives to every customer is not going to help you grow your brand.  According to Experian, personalised emails deliver a 6x higher transactional rate. 

Leverage the customer data you have to help you understand your customers purchase behaviour and segment them into different customer groups. In doing so, you’ll be able to target your customers more effectively and efficiently.

Customology are customer lifecycle and retention specialists. Using the customer and transactional data you have already captured, we can help you segment your customers and design a targeted marketing strategy. Contact a Customologist on 1300 264 549 or hi@customology.com.au for further information.

Source:

¹ https://www.digitalpulse.pwc.com.au/infographic-personalisation-touch/

Subscribe to receive our latest insights

Listen to...