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.