June 28, 2010

Summer Segmentation: Three Months

If there is one segment of customers you want to track every single day, it is the first time buyer with a purchase recency of 0-3 months.

Why 0-3 months?

Almost all of my Multichannel Forensics projects indicate that this is the most important window in the development of a loyal customer.
  • If the customer does not visit your website during this timeframe, you may be at risk for losing the customer.
  • If the customer does visit your website on a periodic basis over this three month timeframe, then pay close attention to what the customer is doing ... is the customer visiting pages on the website that suggest the customer is moving closer to a loyal relationship?
Tailor your offline marketing activities to growing the customer relationship among this customer segment.

Closely analyze the online behavior of this customer segment, and benchmark the behavior against prior years, to see if habits and behavior are changing.

0-3 month first time buyers are a critically important customer segment to track.
Posted by Kevin at 8:15 PM
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2 Comments:

  1. Kevin,

    This is an interesting idea. I have a question and a couple of follow up ideas on this:

    Question: What about products with longer lifecycles (like electronics, appliances, and so forth)?

    Thoughts: Marketers can keep the relationship going through email/other marketing touch points post-purchase with product advice and tips, service warranties, FAQs and on and on.
    The website also needs to support recent buyers as well as those they are attempting to convert. As recent buyers may not be ready to buy again immediately, the site should potentially have other areas to support the purchase like customer service, forums, reviews and such.

    Thanks for the thought-provoking post!

    -Kelly Lorenz
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  2. I analyzed a business with an approximate four year lifecycle two years ago, same trend held ... the customer added-on merchandise to the original order during those first three months, and those were the customers that came back.
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