News
 Customers
Versus Campaigns
Marketing departments today are not thinking about
customers. They are thinking about campaigns. Arthur
Middleton Hughes of KnowledgeBase Marketing shows
you six steps to increase your sales— by studying
your customers rather than just your campaigns.
“What response rate did we get? What were our total
sales by department? How did the new discount
coupons do in comparison with the previous ‘Buy one,
get one free’?” Sound familiar?
Lost in all these data are analyses of the
activities of each customer. Why? Because it is
often very difficult to get customer purchase
information. The data are normally not organized by
customer, but, instead, by transaction and by
campaign. Customers, however, are the ones that are
doing the buying.
To study customers, you have to look at what an
individual has done over the period of a year,
instead of looking just at campaigns.
A large and very profitable retail operation was
conducting massive daily e-mail campaigns, and
studying the results of each campaign by customer.
They discovered that only 10 percent of all
customers who received these e-mails in one year
ever bought anything. Of that 10 percent, about 70
percent made only one purchase during the year.
Thirty percent bought more than once. The analysts
divided these multi-buyers into Silver and Gold
groups based on number of purchases made during one
year. The 15 percent that they classified as Gold
made 45 percent of the total annual sales.
What can be done for your company’s “Gold” buyers?
To answer this question, go back to basic database
marketing principles: It is far easier to get a
buyer to buy a second time than to get a non-buyer
to buy at all. It is far easier to get a multi-buyer
to buy again than to get a single-time buyer do so.
People respond to personalized communications.
Buyers like to think that their supplier appreciates
them and is aware of how much they are spending.
Recent buyers respond better than folks whose
purchase was some time ago. Frequent buyers respond
better than infrequent buyers.
How can you use these principles to increase sales?
Build a marketing database that keeps track of every
customer’s purchase activity. Use it and study the
data.
Ask each customer to provide their home telephone
number when making a purchase. If you don’t have
their name, you can have a service bureau do an
overnight reverse append that will give you a high
percentage of names and addresses of your customers.
For customers enrolled in your frequent buyer club,
get phone numbers and e-mails, and get them to
provide their credit card numbers. When they use
these cards, you can track their purchases in a
nightly roundup.
As soon as a buyer has made their first purchase,
send them a personalized welcome. The welcome
message should, if possible, mention what they
bought, and offer a reward (with an expiration date)
for coming back to buy again.
In all subsequent communications, use the customer’s
name. They are now customers, and should be treated
differently, and better, than non buyers. Use
cookies to welcome them back by name when they come
back to your Web site.
Keep track of each customer’s subsequent purchases.
You may want to set up status levels: Silver, Gold,
and Platinum. Provide special rewards for customers
in these status levels, and let them know what the
rewards are. Let Silver customers know what they
have to do to become Gold.
If you are sending daily e-mails, have a special
unsubscribe routine that asks the subscriber why
they have decided to unsubscribe. Is it because they
did not like your merchandise, or because they did
not like your e-mails? If it is the latter, offer
them an opportunity to receive e-mails weekly, or
monthly, instead of daily. It’s better to be able to
send them some promotions than no promotions at all.
With these six steps in place, you should have no
trouble finding ways to increase your sales.
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Hughes recommends
using reverse append for a high
percentage of names and
addresses returned to you based
on a consumer’s phone number.
Our Consumer Address Append
does just that! Give us an
address or phone number and
we’ll give you a free quote!
Click here for your free quote!
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---Source:
Reprinted from DM News November 15, 2007 issue (www.dmnews.com).
Arthur Middleton Hughes is vice president/solutions
architect for KnowledgeBase Marketing
(www.kbm1.com). Reach him at Arthur.hughes@kbm1.com.
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Melissa Data
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