Customer Categories
The following might sound pretty theoretical, but it’s a valuable way of pinpointing the best promotional method to use if you want to be truly effective. It disciplines you to establish your business goal and clarifies in your mind the audience you want to reach with your sales message.
Broadly speaking there are three categories of customers:
1. Primary: This is your existing customer, the person who has bought from you in the past and still makes use of your products or services.
2. Secondary: These are past customers who have now bought from your opposition.
3. Tertiary: This is the group who have never been customers. It could, however, also be those who do not make use of the full range of products or services your business provides. Then they might be considered primary customers on, say, your product line, but secondary or tertiary on the service or accessory aspect of that product.
Each group obviously needs to be approached differently, though not necessarily by using different promotional techniques, and one type might demand more effort and expense than the other.
Getting to know all we can about them will help guide us:
- Why are they still customers?
- Why did they move to another supplier?
- What are their expectations?
The more you know about them, the better you can prepare promotional messages to which they are likely to respond. It’s like a letter: you’d phrase things differently when writing to a specific customer as opposed to corresponding with a friend.
It’s old hat, but the following exercise does work, even when only some of the questions you ask yourself can be answered:
- Who are you selling to? If your approach is to your Primary group, give some thought to their characteristics. Have you necessarily attracted the right kind of customer in the past?
- Who should you be selling to? This follows on from the above.
- How does that group regard your business?
- How do you want them to regard it?
- Can you meet those expectations?
- What are your opposition’s strengths? Are they currently engaged in promotional activities?
Once you have a better idea of the value of your treasures and the determination of the bidders, you can consider what you want to achieve. Is it to be:
- Customer retention?
- Gaining new customers?
- Increasing purchase frequency?
- Increasing value per purchase?
Sort that lot out, then match your goal to the Primary, Secondary, or Tertiary audience group, and add what you know about them to your promotional recipe.
Recommended Reading
