Omnichannel Customer Behavior

I call this a "Online / Retail Dynamics Map".

The analytics methodology yields nine customers segments (for customers who purchased in the past year ... in-store or online ... and have visited the website at least one time in the past year).

The highest value customers are outlined on the right-hand column. The most valuable customers are in the upper-right cell. Look at their characteristics.

• Purchased more than 14 times in the past year ... these customers are buying something every 26 days.
• They only visited the website 21 times last year. In other words, these customers know what they want, and they go get it.
• 12.4 of the 14.1 purchases happen in-stores. Basically, these customers visit the website every 17 days, buying every 26 days. Again, these are not browsers - these are outstanding customers who simply get the job done. If you're measuring engagement, you might be frustrated with these customers, since you don't get to see the fruits of your labor given that the purchases happen in stores.

Let's compare this customer segment to the lower-right cell in the table.

• Purchased 13.3 times in the past year ... these customers are buying something every 27 days ... very similar to the upper-right segment.
• These folks visited the website 100.3 times in the past year ... once every 3.6 days ... essentially twice a week. These customers are obsessed with this brand. OBSESSED!
• 7.8 of the 13.3 purchases happen online. These are true #omnichannel customers ... the kind of customer you keep reading about in trade journals ... the kind of customer you keep hearing about at conferences.

Both of these customers have similar historical value, and both have good future value. However, the customers exhibit very different behavior, don't they?

• Upper Right = 14 purchases for every 21 website visits, retail-centric customer.
• Lower Right = 13 purchases for every 100 website visits, omnichannel customer.

Let's stop here for today. Please think about how you currently market to each of these customer segments (because you, too, have similar segments). Please think about how you should market to each of these customer segments.

And email me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) if you want to understand how online customers interact with your retail or catalog business.