What Does The Online Ecosystem Look Like?

Recall that call-center buyers dominated the Southern portion of our customer file.

There are several online channels worth looking at. Let's start with retargeting and affiliates and comparison shopping engines.

On average, these channels skew a bit to the Northeast (first-time buyers). The best customers were in the West-Southwest portion of the customer file ... the color here is blue/black. This means best customers typically don't use these channels.

How about Paid/Natural Search?

Ok, this is interesting. Search skews to the Northeast and East-Central portion of the file, where first-time buyers of expensive items (typically only one item per order) reside. In this case, Search is being used by new-to-file customers looking for expensive items (and often at full price).

How about customers who purchase directly from the website, no online ad attribution whatsoever.

Online orders skew to the Northwest portion of the customer file ... average purchase frequency, low price, average items per order. But online buyers also purchase expensive items ... there is a cross-section across the Northern portion of the customer file.

Here is the mix for email buyers.

Look at that - email marketing response aligns almost perfectly with where your best customers reside.

There are two paths that customers appear to take as the progress from newbie to loyal buyer.

1. Online first purchase via high price points and Search, then via online marketing channels, then via the website with no online ad attribution, and then via email marketing at high unit volume and low price points (suggesting that email marketing is calibrated to low price point items - think about that one for a moment).
2. Call center purchases leading to call center purchases via discounts/promotions and low price point items (i.e. the catalog).

Here we are ... a week later ... and we understand how our customer file percolates.