Are Those December Newies All That Bad?

Well, maybe.

Remember when I mentioned that the brand we are studying acquired good customers in August and lousy customers in December? I plotted fraction of new customers from December by new customer quality. What does the image suggest to you?

Among the best newbies, 15% to 20% of 'em were acquired in December. In other words, December newies aren't uniformly "bad" ... there are plenty of fabulous new buyers acquired in December.

Meanwhile, the worst two segments (24 and 25) do not have a huge share of December newbies. In other words, December newbies aren't the "worst" ... though the percentages are very high for not-so-good segments from 19-23.

Remember when I mentioned that August newbies were "good"? Well, what does the graph below tell us?

Oh, isn't that interesting?

Turns out that August newbies are better ... until you get to percentile groups 22-25, where a ton of August newbies exist. What the heck is going on there?

Well, it turns out that there is one merchandise category that is largely offered in late summer, and that category delivers new customers who perform poorly. Take a look at Merchandise Category 15.

The customers acquired from this category perform poorly, don't they? And in a separate analysis I demonstrated that these customers were generally acquired between late June and early September ... with August being the primary month for sales for this category.

There is this bubbly interaction between what you sell, when you sell it, and how you market to customers. It's not something you can easily separate, and it's not something you come up with simple rules to deal with. You have a lot of interactions, and those interactions dictate future success.