Test Customers
Here is what I had written earlier about Test Customers:
We can think of the long tail of customers as comprising of one or all of the following:
- The bottom 50% of customers
- Leads who have not yet matured into customers
- Offline customers who are unknown to the brand
Each requires a different strategy.
Here are some ideas for the bottom 50% of customers:
- Generate more transactions and reduce service costs via ‘multiple and wide nets’
- Possible segmentation: value customers (coupon/discount) or niche buyers
- Capture additional data at time of (first) transaction
- Use martech to ensure tech-led engagement to reduce service costs
- Capture engagement data and work towards replica of BCG (Best Customer Genome)
What I had not discussed then is the how. How can the long tail of customers be targeted and engaged? How can they be persuaded to give the brand another try? While it is possible that some of this segment may have come only for a specific objective to the brand site or app, the important point to note is that they did engage. The brand is not an unknown. So, perhaps with the right approach, the relationship can be reactivated. The question of course is how.
The current approach taken by brands is to push promotional emails or SMSes (assuming the customer or visitor shared the email address or mobile number). There is nothing special done for this cohort. Promotional emails typically are a list of periodic offers focused on enticing some action. After some time, these promotional emails tend to look the same to the customer and are ignored – as happens to 85% of brand emails. The marketer then stops sending emails – worried about impacting the domain reputation because of low engagement. And thus, a relationship is broken and lost forever.
And here’s the rub: it is entirely possible that the brand’s acquisition programmes will perhaps target and try to reacquire the same customer again! This is a cycle that continues. The only beneficiaries are the digital media companies like Google and Facebook who make good money from lazy marketers.
We have all experienced this: the same promotional emails or notifications that flood our inbox from brands we had engaged at some time. And we know what to do with such messages – ignore or delete. So, what is the answer? Is there a better way to engage with Test customers? Is there a more cost-effective way to reawaken them? Yes. The answer is microns.
