Interventions
The implementation of Progency begins with a crucial strategic decision: determining the optimal point of intervention within the customer base. This choice sets the foundation for success, defining both the scope of the initial engagement and the expectations for measurable outcomes.
Which Segment?
- Best Customer Enhancement: Focusing on the top 20% of customers who already generate 60-80% of revenue and 200% of profits. This approach aims to further maximise the value of already high-performing customers.
- Rest Customer Activation: Targeting the middle 40-50% showing declining engagement. This segment represents customers at a critical inflection point—either on their way to becoming Best customers or sliding toward Test status.
- Cross-Segment Approach: Implementing across the entire customer base, addressing all segments simultaneously with varying strategies.
- Test Customer Recovery: Focusing specifically on dormant customers (inactive 90+ days) through reactivation campaigns rather than expensive reacquisition.
- Vertical Segment Focus: Targeting customers across segments but within a specific product category, purchase behaviour, or demographic vertical.
Comparative Analysis
Best Customer Approach
- Pros: Immediate revenue impact; builds on existing engagement; easier to measure success; lower risk of failure.
- Cons: Potential cannibalisation of internal team’s focus area; limited growth ceiling; may create internal resistance; highest-value customers already receive attention.
Rest Customer Approach
- Pros: Addresses the largest untapped opportunity; clear differentiation from internal team focus; measurable conversion paths from Rest to Best; significant revenue upside potential.
- Cons: Longer time to demonstrate results; requires deeper platform integration; success metrics may be less straightforward.
Cross-Segment Approach
- Pros: Comprehensive impact; holistic customer strategy; potential for systems-level transformation.
- Cons: Diluted focus; more complex implementation; higher resource requirements; challenging performance measurement; potential organisational resistance.
Test Customer Recovery
- Pros: Clear ROI versus reacquisition costs; highly measurable outcomes; addresses AdWaste directly.
- Cons: More challenging to reactivate truly dormant customers; may overlap with NeoN targeting; smaller immediate revenue opportunity.
Vertical Segment Focus
- Pros: Allows for specialised industry expertise; clearer testing boundaries; easier implementation.
- Cons: May miss cross-category opportunities; creates artificial customer divisions; potential data integration challenges.
CMO Comfort Factors
Most CMOs will naturally gravitate toward the Rest customer approach as the optimal starting point for several reasons:
- Complementary Focus: It doesn’t compete with their team’s likely concentration on Best customers, avoiding territorial conflicts.
- Clear Measurement: The Rest-to-Best conversion path provides unambiguous metrics for success—counting how many customers migrate upward and tracking their increased spending.
- Risk Mitigation: Starting with a subset of Rest customers enables a controlled pilot that can scale once proven, reducing implementation risk.
- Strategic Alignment: Rest customers represent the greatest revenue upside with minimal investment—perfectly matching the “more with less” mandate most CMOs operate under.
- Organisational Acceptance: Teams typically welcome support for overlooked segments rather than perceiving intervention as criticism of their current focus areas.
The optimal implementation approach typically begins with a specific Rest segment pilot (perhaps 50,000-100,000 customers) with clear control groups for performance comparison. Starting with this focused approach allows for measurable results within 90 days while building organisational confidence before expanding to broader segments or more complex interventions.
By targeting Rest customers first, Progency establishes a clear value proposition: transforming overlooked, declining relationships into high-value Best customers without disrupting existing marketing operations—exactly the balance most CMOs seek when implementing revolutionary new approaches.
