Bob Uecker

He passed yesterday - he was the soundtrack of a Wisconsin summer for five-and-a-half decades, though you might know him from the movie Major League.

My Grandfather used to keep score of Brewers games in the mid-70s (helping fuel my budding interest in statistics) ... he'd just get up from the living room at 6:55pm, pour himself a 7oz glass of Kingsbury beer, open up his season-long scorebook, and lose himself in Uecker-isms via a transistor radio. His Father-In-Law lived upstairs, listening to games. That guy was born 19 years after the end of the Civil War. Time flies, folks.

What a colorful life.

18 Months Away And Then BOOM, The Customer Reappears: Action Streams

In old-school print, you segment the customer (16-18 months of recency, 1 life-to-date purchase), look at historical performance (profitable or not), then decide whether you send a bunch of paper to the customer. You throw 84 pages in the mail and hope for 1% of customers to buy something, the rest is pure waste.

In traditional e-commerce, the 16-18 month 1x customer gets your standard array of 5-20 batch-and-blast email campaigns per week, not personalized (from a merchandising standpoint).

Smarter e-commerce professionals personalize "what" the customer sees in email marketing based on historical purchase activity. These professionals generate 20% to 50% better click-through and conversion rates than traditional e-commerce professionals generate.

Modern e-commerce gurus POUNCE on the slightest bit of customer interest. When the 16-18 month 1x customer decides to visit your website, it's "action time".

• The customer is moved into a separate email "stream".
• Content shifts from education / entertainment (designed to create engagement) to "buying something now". Many of you already do "some" of this (cart abandonment programs) ... but your personalized "Action Stream" should match purchase history with what the customer just looked at. If you were ever going to offer a discount/promotion, this might be a good time to explore the topic.

Are "Action Streams" hard work? Sure.

Action Streams are also your future, if you're not already doing something comparable.

• Use social / video to keep the customer interested.
• Use batch-and-blast email campaigns to link social / video to commerce.
• Use Action Streams to POUNCE on customers who just visited your website and showed the slightest bit of interest in your brand.

Some of Those Customers Suddenly Reappear

In the stone ages of e-commerce (1999), I worked at Eddie Bauer. We had a Home business.

Those of you who have worked in Apparel and Home fully realize that these are two completely different business models.

• Apparel = Purchases every few months.
• Home = A cluster of purchases, followed by dormancy, followed by a potential future cluster of purchases.

You can spend marketing dollars marketing to existing Apparel customers, because their purchase cycle is short. Future purchases are always coming.

Home? Be careful. Our Home business at Eddie Bauer never turned a profit. The closest we got was in 1999 when we lost a quarter-million dollars. What did we do differently? We treated customers who just bought differently than we treated prospects.

• We stopped mailing most existing Home customers after three months.
• We rented every possible customer we could from Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma, mailing those customers instead of our own Home customers.

We live in a different world today. Regardless, you shouldn't waste marketing dollars on customers who are not likely to repurchase. When a customer isn't likely to buy, you use email marketing and social channels and video to maintain a low-cost relationship - to remind the customer that you're still there.

• The minute the Home customer visits your website and looks at Home products, you should immediately "Action Stream" a series of in-house marketing designed to close a sale right now. It's a different marketing cadence than you can get away with in other product lines.

Some of those Home customers suddenly reappear. Modern software allows you to know the minute a lapsed customer visits your website, enabling you to trigger specialized campaigns with a personalized merchandise assortment.  Why we don't take advantage of website visits among lapsed buyers with triggered campaign paths is beyond me.

Momente të shkëlqyera në historinë e të gjithë kanaleve

 

Subscriptions

More than a decade ago I worked with an e-commerce startup. You could buy their products online, or you could sign up for a subscription, allowing you to continue to receive products on a monthly basis.

My job was to evaluate the subsequent behavior of a subscription customer vs. a classic e-commerce customer.

• The e-commerce customer bought +/- 3 times per year, had a reasonable repurchase rate, and continued to buy +/- 3 times per year moving forward.
• The subscription customer? The customer bought for three consecutive months ... unsubscribed ... then just disappeared. No/Few subsequent purchases.

You should have seen the mortified look on the face of the Owner - I met him in Seattle for lunch, to go over the results of the analysis. He looked like somebody slapped him in the stomach with a pickleball paddle. He realized, quickly, that he simply accelerated all purchases that would be spread out over time into a short window, got a sugar high for his efforts, and then immediately needed new customers or he was finished.

A year later, his business was finished.

It isn't easy to do, but a good subscription program accelerates purchases without dissuading subsequent activity. The best subscription programs capitalize on perishable goods that must be replaced. You need 5G to make your iPhone work, so you keep paying for it. You don't necessarily need to keep eating pretzels with specialty mustards.

It's $690 For a Brown Scarf

Yeah, take a look.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a customer to pay $690 for a scarf?

In a world where you can pay $9.99 for a perfectly credible scarf delivered in just hours, it is infinitely hard to accomplish this task.

And yet ... somewhere, there are marketers who convince their target audience that this is a perfectly good use of customer funds. And don't tell me "well, those are rich people so the rules are different" because yes the rules are different, but you still have to convince the customer to spend the money that way vs. an infinite number of ways that rich people can spend money.

You'll find a thousand vendors who will help you figure out how to use technology to offer the exact right discount at the exact right time to the exact right customer.

You'll find virtually nobody who is able to convince a customer to pay $690 for a scarf.

I just wonder how much we've all been deluded by third parties to chase the lowest-common denominator?

Judy, Jennifer, Jasmine

Back in 2012 I put together a popular series about three personas ... Judy, Jennifer, and Jasmine (click here). So popular, in fact, that I was invited to speak at a conference in New England about the personas (here's the agenda for those of you who enjoy nostalgia). These were heady times ... you didn't need to bring $20,000 to the agency running the conference to be able to address the entire audience like many conferences require of their speakers today. Keep that in mind as you think about the NRF's "Big Show" that is coming up (yes, somebody sent me the pitch deck they received for how much people have to pay to play there .... that's what modern conferences are all about ... you are most assuredly not getting brilliant insights from the best and brightest, you are getting content from people paying for access to you).

Thirteen years later, the personas have aged.

• Judy = 72 years old.
• Jennifer = 56 years old.
• Jasmine = 40 years old.

Judy is the catalog-loving shopper ... notice that she's been retired for seven years. If you manage a catalog brand and Judy is still your customer (she would have been 42 years old in the era of J. Peterman on Seinfeld), project her spending levels into the next decade as she enters her eighties ... then project your paper/printing/postage costs, and you're in for a scintillating exploration of the Darwinistic principles of Capitalism.

Stunningly ... Jennifer is nearly Judy's age from that presentation in 2012. And she behaves nothing like Judy.

When I gave the presentation in 2012, the audience audibly groaned when I introduced Jennifer. They ... did ... not ... like ... her ... at ... all. Which is too bad, because today these brands realize they NEED Jennifer. They need to know who she is, they need to know what she desires. The time to start knowledge exploration was back in 2005. The second best time to do this was back in 2012. 

The third best time to start is today.

P.S.:  There are some in this audience who strongly believe in certain marketing tactics. Let's ignore tactics for a moment. Answer the following two questions for each individual below ... first, how much disposable income does each individual have, and second, what needs does the individual have that you are able to meet with your current merchandise/product assortment?

• Judy, 72 Years Old.
• Jennifer, 56 Years Old.
• Jasmine, 40 Years Old.
• Jadyn, 24 Years Old.

The answers to your questions should be telling, and should inform you of what you need to do in 2025 and beyond to be relevant.