Channel by Age Interaction

You read these research reports or trade journal articles, and they tell you what "the customer" is doing.

"Your customer", however, is not "the customer".  Your customer is different.  So your mileage varies.

Channels help us understand "your customer".  Look at customers who purchase from your call center.

Tall bars represent channel preference.  Not surprising, then, that June (age = 76) prefers shopping via your call center.  Not surprising, either, that Jasmine (age = 28) and Jennifer (age = 44) don't like shopping over the telephone.  If your business is skewed to the call center, well, guess who your customer is?  If your business is skewed to the call center, what does that mean for the future of your business?

How about online transactions, those not attributed to other marketing channels?

This is hardly surprising, either.  The more your business skews to unattributed online orders, the more likely your business caters to Jasmine, or to a lesser extent, Jennifer.  Dark matter, those unattributed online orders, frequently skew to younger customers.

Here's email marketing.

Email peaks with Jennifer, and there's a bump for Judy.  Notice the dip for Jasmine.  Jasmine is different, as we will see later, her email orders shift to other channels, and for good reason.

The next two graphs are for paid search and natural search.

The two graphs are similar, aren't they?  Search is the realm of Jennifer and Jasmine ... with Jennifer skewing a bit to paid search, Jasmine skewing a bit to natural search.

Yes, your mileage will vary.

Let's look at Affiliates.

The mix is changing, isn't it?  In fact, CSEs look similar to Affiliates.  Jennifer is typically looking for free shipping, whereas Jasmine seeks the lowest possible price and free shipping - remember, Jasmine simply doesn't have a lot of money.  Judy doesn't trust Affiliates as much.

Finally, orders attributed to Social Media.

This really skews to Jasmine, doesn't it?

We keep reading that "the customer does everything", so you must be "omnichannel".

Wrong.

Know who your customer is.

Append age of customer.

Track the channels each age cohort purchases from - as you can see in our example, there are clear trends by demographic cohort.

And yes, your mileage will vary.  I'm asking you to do the hard work, the heavy lifting.  Don't read a survey of 994 likely shoppers and make decisions for 250,000 customers.  Do the analysis yourself.  Determine the channels "your customer" prefers.  Then go after those channels.

Thoughts?  Questions?