You may be familiar with the 80/20 rule of digital marketing. This can be applied across various areas, but in terms of customers, it suggests that 80% of a company’s revenue and traffic comes from 20% of their customers.
That 20% can be referred to as your ‘super customers’. This part of your customer base is extremely important. These super customers should be looked after and added to if possible.
What makes a Super Customer?
A super customer likes your brand, trusts you as a company and returns time and again to your ecommerce website to see what you have to offer.
Super customers likely come to you over your competitors for a spectrum of reasons. The better understanding you have of what these reasons are, the better position you are in to cater to them and add to their numbers.
Understanding the Facts
One of the best ways to get to grips with your super customer segment is by analysing visitor trends. Pinning down the age and gender of your customers can give you greater insight into who is taking up your retail offers.
But be sure not to simply take things on face value. As an example, you may have a lot of visits from males between 21-25. But they may not be converting into customers as frequently as females of the same age. Female visitor numbers may be lower, but if they convert more frequently and spend longer on your site, more of your super customers are likely in this bracket.
Similarly, try to identify the reasons behind why visitors are coming to your site over your competitors.
As an example, you might be a retailer of sports trainers. Are visitors coming to your site searching for the most expensive trainers you have with a highly-regarded brand name? Or are they looking for less expensive, more practical trainers and aren’t worried about the brand name at all?
By getting hold of this information, you can tailor advertising and pricing accordingly. In the age of IoT as well, it’s not impossible to personalise what you push to individual customers and enhance the chances of additional purchases based on what they’ve bought before.
If you can better understand each customers’ relationship with you as a brand and your website, you can cater to their needs more effectively and either keep them as a super customer or give the best chance of them becoming a super customer.
How do Visitors Get to You?
By analysing trends around search, you can get a better understanding of how people are discovering your brand.
Segment your customers into low, medium and high frequency visitors to your site. If you correlate this with what they are searching for when they reach your site, you can tailor your offerings, promotions and even your user experience to make it easier for the customers that visit your site most frequently to purchase what they want, when they want it.
Equally, by analysing what medium to low frequency visitors are searching for, there’s an opportunity to find ways to better engage with these customers and boost the chances of them becoming your super customers.
A dedicated PPC campaign can help you push relevant terms and enhance your visibility via search
Optimising your site for SEO purposes can also be advantageous, as can a technical SEO audit. This gives you a greater chance of new visitors coming to your site. That in turn gives more people the chance to become one of your super customers.
Don’t forget that not all visitors come via search. Other advertising channels can be effective at securing customers and developing loyalty. If you are noticing that many of your high frequency visitors are coming from other mediums such as news channels, email campaigns and social media for example, you can then act accordingly.
Make sure you look after the super customers you do have by giving them reasons to stay loyal to you, and having a presence in the places they are most likely to see it. Are your super customers coming to you via Twitter and Facebook? Then it makes sense to promote your next offer via these platforms.
“Carrying out deep analysis of individual users and their shopping behaviours helps retailers identify lapsed customers, VIP customers and everything in between,” explains Keri Williams, Marketing Director at Williams Commerce. “Retention marketing strategies can then be created to encourage change in shopper behaviours. For example, with regards to your VIP segment, the marketing strategy might include special rewards and incentives to thank your super customers, who are loyal and continue to shop regularly. These could include small gifts on birthdays, small gifts within orders or personalised thank you notes for example. Or you could ask your VIPs to contribute to new product development ideas. These types of initiative can go a long way to retain your highest spending customers.”
Gaining an Advantage
Analysing customer trends also allows you to better identify why some customers may be selecting your competitors over you.
To use the trainer example again, if you’re seeing a competitor doing well in terms of selling high-end, expensive trainers, look into why they are being successful. Can you match or better what they offer? And have you clearly carved out your niche, your USP in that space? We define a USP as the single most compelling benefit(s) your brand or product offers over or better than the competition. Do you know what this is and can clearly articulate this at multiple touch points across your online properties?
Understanding and monitoring your competition’s strategy and tactics will help give you an edge, making you more agile as a business and enable you to tailor your own approach to compete in a crowded market place effectively and hopefully an even better chance of adding to your super customer demographic.
Analyse and Capitalise
By analysing your customer base and gaining new levels of insight, you can tailor your offering around your super customers and give yourself the best chance of adding to your numbers moving forwards.
You can create a better overview of why your super customers are picking you over the competition, calculate where and when to advertise to the greatest effect, and enhance your overall decision making.
“In the Williams Commerce marketing team, we go to efforts from the outset to create a digital strategy document in collaboration with our clients,” says Williams. “This contains objective and KPI setting for short and long-term goals, competitor analysis, industry analysis, customer SWOT analysis, customer brand guidelines, target audience insights and user persona creation. It’s this type of detail that helps form part of the marketing strategy and unlocks key insights into target audience and customers.”
In a competitive retail ecommerce space, there’s no reason to miss out. By gaining a better understanding of your super customers and doing what you can to cater to them, you stand to benefit in a big way.
Williams Commerce specialises in helping retail and ecommerce companies enhance their digital marketing approach. Find out more by getting in touch today.
