As discussed earlier, there are three tracks to grow profitability:
- Velvet Rope Marketing for the top 20% (Best Customers)
- Median Customer Marketing for the middle 30% (Rest Customers)
- Long Tail Marketing for the bottom 50% (Test Customers)
We have discussed VRM and how the combination of CDP, CLV, BCG, Martech and Adtech can help brands identify Best Customers, provide them a Velvet Rope experience, acquire more like them and help the newly acquired customers to become Best Customers faster.
Let us now turn our attention to the middle 30% — what I have termed as the “Rest Customers.” These are customers who have a lower CLV than the Best, are still profitable for the brand, but perhaps not as loyal or valuable as the Best. These can also be termed as “median customers” – not at the top or at the bottom of the CLV pyramid. Hence, I have used the term “Median Customer Marketing” to identify the initiatives for this segment. What can be done with these customers?
There are two activities that can help grow profitability from the Rest Customers – nudging them to the “next best action” and identifying future Best Customers by analysing the genomes for each of them.
Here is a brief on next best action marketing from NGData: “The concept of delivering the right message to the right customer, at the right time, and via the right channel has been around for some time. Next best action marketing can best be described as an evolution of this concept, evaluating the customer’s past behaviour, recent actions, interests, and needs in the context of the organization’s marketing goals to identify the most effective action (making an offer, a promotion, reaching out by phone, sending an email, etc.) to achieve desired outcomes.”
Here is additional info from Optimove: “Next best action marketing (NBAM) is a customer-centric approach to marketing in which the goal is to address each customer with the marketing treatment most likely to generate the desired result. NBAM differs from other marketing approaches in two key respects: (1) it is customer-oriented instead of being product-oriented, and (2) it aims to approach each customer within the context of their unique behaviours, needs and preferences instead of by assuming all customers (or large subsets of a customer base) will respond similarly.”
What needs to be done is to identify where a customer is along the journey and use a martech solution to nudge the customer with a specific action. This action can be identified by looking at genomes of similar customers and identifying what they did next.
A similar genome analysis can help identify customers who could have the potential to be moved to a higher spend with the brand. This is important because there will always be some churn from among the Best Customers so creating a pipeline of future Best Customers becomes important.
Tomorrow: Becoming Chief Profitability Officer (Part 7)
