Three Teams
At its simplest level to get as close to the ideal, businesses (and marketers) need to do three things: keep the Best customers forever, migrate the Rest customers to becoming Best, and acquire Next customers with the potential to become the Best. In other words: Retain the Best, Rest to Best and Next like Best. Each of these three functions are distinct and need to be run by different teams for Best, Rest and Next customers.
Best: The goal of this team is to imagine the most amazing experiences for the top 20% customers. While they view the brand positively and don’t need much prompting to return to the brand’s properties, the question marketers must ask is: how can one go beyond just loyalty programs and treat these customers like royalty? This is where the ideas of “Velvet Rope Marketing” come in. Exclusivity, ease and access are three axes to define new customer experiences. Further reading:
- Velvet Rope Marketing
- Becoming Chief Profitability Officer
- The One Number to Predict Profits
- Rethinking Referral Marketing
- How Velvet Rope Marketing can transform Customer Loyalty
- Best Customers and Velvet Rope Marketing
Rest: For the other 80%, the number one challenge is to get engagement going with the marketing messages being sent by the brand. These customers are not yet loyal to the brand and tend to ignore the emails, push notifications and SMSes sent. Brands have limited data about them thus making it difficult to do segmentation and personalisation. Without actions on the messages, it is very difficult to bring the Rest customers to the brand properties. And without them visiting the website or opening the app, it is almost impossible to get them to do transactions. Also, loyalty programs (in case they exist) don’t work with them because they never earn enough points to garner the rewards and benefits. So, the key challenge is to ensure the Rest customers engage with brand communications. Push messages are the only way to reach out to the Rest. They need to be lured back. This is where the ideas of Microns and Mu come in – to get customers to pay attention, pay for attention. Think of this as “Attention Rewards Marketing” (ARM) – messages with goodies to begin a lifelong relationship with customers. This is the starting point for migrating Rest to Best. Further reading:
- Microns: Making B2C Emails Better
- Microns: Theory and Economics
- Microns and Brands: Made for Each Other
- Micron-verse: The New World of Brand-Customer Communications
- Microns: Solving the Customer Reactivation Problem
- Microns and AMP: A Powerful Combo
- Microns and Loyalty: Gamifying and Rewarding Attention
- Micronbox: A New Inbox
- Imagining Mus: An Attention-Action Currency
- Micron-verse: Making It Happen
Next: Brands have been focused on new customer acquisition since time immemorial. The only change that needs to be done here is to acquire new customers based on the Best Customer Genome (BCG) rather than indiscriminately. Instead of relying on only Google and Facebook, brands should persuade their Best customers to refer others like them – and that is only going to happen when the Best customers have experiences they can talk about and share on their social networks. Each Best customer is a micro-influencer. This is the best way to acquire Next like the Best. This team thus needs to focus on cloning the attributes and behaviour of the Best for new acquisition and onboarding.
Three teams, each with clear objectives: protect the Best, persuade the Rest, prospect the Next. One common theme: get existing customers to pay for attention. How can marketers make it happen?
