The economics of starting and managing customer relationships have changed profoundly during the 30 years our team has been designing and executing customer programs. While it used to cost millions to contact your highest spending customers with high-impact physical mail, digital and social media now allow brands to spread their budgets over a much broader group of customers. Our Customer CultivationTM practice will help you understand the strategies and tactics you can use to identify and communicate with a larger group of potentially great customers.
As digital contact channels have proliferated, brands have been presented with an exciting array of new, inexpensive opportunities to reach customers. This proliferation requires careful coordination to manage a consistent message and identify and nurture prospects with high profit potential. We have developed specific e-CultivationTM strategies that leverage the significant cost advantages of collecting data and deploying omni-channel campaigns digitally.
Managing Relationships in a Digital Environment
Our pioneering approach to establishing e-lationshipTM strategies for our clients dates back to the mid-1990’s when our Founder helped United Airlines build one of the first airline loyalty program’s email database. Offering United Mileage Plus® members incentives to opt-in for email communications allowed United to dramatically lower its costs while increasing the frequency of engagement. Importantly, at the outset, the strategy included asking the member how frequently they wanted to receive email from United.
Today, we continue to develop specific e-lationship strategies that offer significant cost advantages as we send interactive customer engagement messages, collecting data of the customer’s needs, interests and competitive spend. And, we’re showing our clients how increased engagement measurably drives increased sales and profits.
Embracing the 18-55 Segment of your Customers
Many of a brand’s customers who have the most potential to spend more are not among the brands best customers. To need to look deeper to identify these high-potential customers, inviting customers to share data on their total category spend and whether they have VIP status with the brand’s competitors. By profiling your new customers … asking a couple of questions about their shopping frequency and total spend in your category, along with periodically asking how one can better serve regular customers, one can identify the “category-heavy-splitter.”
Given that 2% of a brand’s customers in many high-profile industries can be shown to drive 25% or more of sales, brands typically focus their energy and their rewards on what we call the 2-25 customer segment. Embracing our 18-55TM strategy can unlock hidden profits, by recognizing and thanking the often ignored “18-55” segment … the other 18% of the 20% of customers classically viewed as generating 80% of sales.
The key to our 18-55 strategy is identifying the customers splitting their purchases across multiple brands and offering them benefits that steal share without lessening the benefits and rewards visibly offered to one loyalists.
If you want to learn more about building a program that finds tomorrow’s best customers by better cultivating and engaging with your occasional customers, please contact us.