Quiz Week: Question #1

This week we're going to cover comp segment results that frequently arise in my work. Your job is to diagnose the reason why the business is succeeding or failing.

Question #1:  Here are comp new/reactivated comps, and comp segment results ... for the past six months. What is the likely cause of this business not meeting expectations.

Comp New/Reactivated Buyer Counts:

• Sep:  -22%.
• Aug:  -18%.
• Jul:    -30%.
• Jun:  +13%.
• May: +11%.
• Apr:    +8%.

Comp Segment (Those With Exactly Two Purchases In The Past Year) Results.

• Sep:  +6%.
• Aug:  +8%.
• Jul:    +5%.
• Jun:   +7%.
• May:  +3%.
• Apr:   +9%.

Based on what you see here, what is the reason this business did not meet expectations in recent months? What would cause a business to exhibit the comp new/reactivated buyer and comp segment results you see here? What would you do to fix the problem?

8%

Here's a gem.

I've been working in corporate America for more than thirty-eight years. The number of blank stares I've received when suggesting an A/B test when the person on the other side of the conversation is a ROAS believer ... well, it's a staggering number of blank stares!

A/B tests are humbling. They force you to address your personal marketing belief system. It's been my experience that not many professionals want to address their personal marketing belief system.

60%

In sports, the trend is moving toward building small stadiums. Colorado State comes to mind a few years ago. Northwestern this year, building a 35,000 seat stadium. Instead of probably not selling an inexpensive seat four thousand feet above the field, premium seats with premium experiences are sold at premium prices. Five thousand highly enthusiastic and/or wealthy individuals pay a ton more, the remaining 30,000 pay more.

Similar things are happening in ecommerce. The "middle" of the customer file is simply disappearing, being replaced by either one-time buyers that the brand needs to generate a handsome profit on the acquisition transaction ... or ... loyal buyers are subsidizing the core business.

I've told you this many times ... I define a loyal buyer as somebody who has a 60% or greater chance of buying again in the next year. As we continue to lose all of the "middle" customers to Amazon, the loyal buyer audience becomes increasingly important, because without them there is no profit.

In sports, this audience gets premium experiences, given what they're paying.

In ecommerce?

If I had to make a prediction for the future, I'd predict that "somebody smart" will figure out how to give premium experiences to loyal buyers. Not points. Not discounts. Not BOGOs. Not free shipping. No. Somebody smart is going to figure out what the premium experiences are that are unique to your best customers. Amazon figured it out - you pre-spend just south of $200 a year and somebody delivers the solar yard lights you purchased at 8:58pm tonight by 7:00am the next morning. Oh, the premium experience also includes NFL football games and NBA basketball games and NASCAR and first-run television series and Pickleball TV.

That's what we are competing against.

Have your analytically minded guru score your customer file ... have her tell you how many customers you have that have a 60% or better chance of buying again next year ... have her do this quarterly for the past three years. Have her show you what is happening to your loyal customer base. Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Is it contracting faster than the rest of your twelve-month buyer file?

If your analyst won't perform the work, contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and I'll do it for you. Figure out how many premium customers you have, figure out what you can do for them.

Triggers / Targeting / Personalization

On my last trip to Europe, a vendor was telling a conference attendee how he had a client that was dynamically merchandising a catalog. The client had creative for several hundred products, the client sent the vendor customer purchase transactions, and the vendor assembled a personalized catalog for every customer based on prior purchase transactions. The conference attendee looked at the vendor, and said (I'm paraphrasing here):

• "That takes all the fun out of creating a catalog."

The conference attendee walked away. The vendor sales person look at me and said"

• "I don't understand why almost no catalog professionals realize that we're trying to help them. This happens to us all the time."

Professionals understand that the vendor was trying to help ... and would likely generate more profit.

Maybe you feel this way about your job. Have you ever had a new management team take over your department? A new Vice President? And she doesn't like how you are doing things, so she starts telling you that the way you're doing your job is "wrong" and she prescribes a new way to do things? You feel angry. You believe that she "doesn't get it!" You dig your heels in. You go through the five stages of grief. If you've ever been in this situation, you are reflecting the "that takes all the fun out of creating a catalog" statement above. You are that person!

I've been there.

There are three things that are incongruent with campaign-centric styles of marketing.

• Trigger-based marketing.
• Customer targeting.
• Personalization.

It's one of the reasons some old-school marketers slide into email campaign execution seamlessly. It's a campaign. Everybody gets the same thing. Creation is fun!

It's one of the reasons some old-school marketers slide into social media. It's a campaign. All 199,000 followers get one message, with the added benefit that 25 of the recipients provide feedback. It feels good! Each message is a carefully created campaign.

Meanwhile, AI will usher in an era of machine-oriented triggers / targeting / personalization that will be outside of anybody's control. For many, that's going to take all the fun out of creating. For other professionals, it will be their turn to help run a business.

PostPilot

I don't talk about vendors a whole lot, for good reason. Early in my consulting work I'd be asked to partner with various vendors, the vendors would let my clients down, my clients would stop working with me for recommending a vendor ... you get the picture.

So, I don't have a relationship with anybody at PostPilot (click here). I haven't been asked to say anything about PostPilot.

I will say that a portion of their services are calibrated to helping the catalog brands that still remain.

Print-based marketing is in trouble, and has been for twenty years. Why should you spend $1 sending paper to a customer just because the customer hasn't purchased in 30 months and "might" be a reactivation candidate? Well, the reason you are doing that is because people at your company LOVE creating catalogs. They LOVE the process. They LOVE creatively enticing a customer via a spread. They LOVE the process, regardless of profit.

Profit.

Until the generation of catalog buyers (I'm not talking about the retailers that mail catalogs as branding pieces and don't care about profitability) is no longer employed, the profitability of mailing efforts will continue to erode. This will force those who adore print into a corner (it has been doing this for twenty years).

• To maintain the craft, the catalog-centric professional must focus only on the most productive customers ... the most loyal customers ... or the most recently active customers. These will be the only two viable audiences going forward.

Which brings me back to PostPilot. Now, I get it, you want to merchandise 64 pages, you don't want trigger-based marketing via post cards, that's not what you love doing. The "market" doesn't care what you love doing. The "market" is giving you a small window of opportunity to do something via print.

• Customers who have done "something recently" ... clicked through an email campaign, visited your website, signed up for credit, purchased, interacted with your social media presence ... these customers are profitable via print for a very small period of time. Why wouldn't you capitalize on this small period of time? With print? With the craft you love?

Again, I don't have a relationship with anybody at PostPilot, I haven't been asked to say anything, I just see a small window in the customer relationship process where you could "do something with print" and it "could/should be profitable". I mean, I'd rather leverage email marketing for everything given it costs essentially nothing and a postcard is going to cost at least $0.60, but a portion of my audience loves print, so have at it.

Infrequent Buyers

In about three weeks, a large fraction of your inactive customer file will awaken, briefly. For about 6-7 weeks thereafter, customers who purchase gifts ... customers who like winter-centric merchandise ... they'll awaken after a pummeling of email campaigns over the prior 44 weeks when the gift/winter-centric customer could have cared less.

And then? They'll go quiet again.

In 1999 at Eddie Bauer, our Home customers went dormant as a matter of practice. They bought bedding or pillows or whatever, then their needs were met. We'd waste a fortune mailing catalogs to an audience that was largely dormant. My team got tired of being blamed for low response ... "DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO TARGET CUSTOMERS??" ... well, yeah, we knew how to target customers, it's just that the customers the company wanted us to target were dormant. So we rented the living daylights out of the Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn file, and those names worked! Those customers had not just purchased our merchandise.

Obviously it's a different world in 2026. Regardless, you have your product listing ads ready for the dormant customers who are ready to bite. You have a fundamentally different email marketing cadence for the portion of your email subscriber file that is dormant for ten+ months then highly active for 6-7 weeks. Your website recognizes the formerly dormant customer and treats that customer differently.

Take advantage of the tools at your disposal for managing infrequent buyers. This is your time to shine ... it's not a Black Friday / Cyber Monday 60% off opportunity, it's an opportunity to enhance the customer relationship with infrequent customers.

The Long and Winding Road

Your business performance is undoubtedly due to decisions you recently made.

It's also the outcome of decisions made 1-3 years ago.

I worked with a company that threw away winning merchandise ... they just killed a bunch of items, replacing them with stuff that didn't work. Customers acquired 3-5 years ago were loyal to a style of merchandise that they were acquired from. It took this company about thirty months to rebuild the merchandise assortment and ultimately identify new winning items that were aligned with the winning items from 3-5 years ago.

Do you want to know one of the huge benefits of having a 15% or 20% annual rebuy rate? Rebuilding your business is not a long and winding road! You can reinvent your customer base annually! The low-retention businesses I've been aligned with constantly reinvent themselves, they aren't beholden to the past. It's a feature of this business model.

If you are Macy's and you have a customer base with a 60% annual rebuy rate? You can't reinvent anything!! You are truly on a long and winding road, you're not driving the car and your customers own the keys to your car. Any change you make is met with criticism from your long-time loyal customer base. Pundits mock companies like Macy's for not being willing to change or evolve with the times. Pundits are wrong ... companies like Macy's cannot change or evolve with the times or their existing customer base will reject them. They're stuck. It's a huge disadvantage for having a loyal customer base. You're quite honestly better off creating new brands than trying to reinvent the existing brand, your loyal customers won't let you reinvent the existing brand.

Both the low-rebuy ecommerce brand and the loyalty-centric retail brand need to develop new items that become winning items. This part of business is universal, and it's a lot of fun for the marketer/analyst who decides to help grow the business via great items.

Newness

I watched some of the US-Spain Women's Soccer match Tuesday night.

So many players I didn't recognize. The ones I recognized largely won the Olympics a few years ago. The great class from 2015-2019, the players who struggled in the 2023 World Cup, they're gone. Times change, and if future players aren't identified and developed, future performance suffers.

Have you watched the Kansas City Chiefs play football this year? Patrick Mahomes is running the show, but look at his supporting cast ... it's a new generation of players, isn't it?

You know all about this dynamic, don't you?

If you don't find new customers, future performance suffers.

If you don't develop new items into winning items, future performance suffers.

In many ways, if you don't explore new marketing channels, future performance suffers. It's one of the blind spots of modern ecommerce professionals ... pursuit of marketplaces resulted in dead ends and missed opportunities elsewhere. Yes, some of you with commodity products are actually better-served selling on Amazon than on your own platform. Those of you who spent the past twenty years building viable "brands" have better opportunities to pursue.

Ecommerce is an endless exploration of "newness". If you are an analytically-focused professional, there's an entire career that can be built from the blueprint of newness + winners (winning items, winning customers).

A CEO Who's Customer Retention Heart Had Hardened

Back in the days when somebody paid to put you on an airplane (i.e. pre-video-conference days), I was asked by a CEO to visit his company to address a comment I made in a project writeup.

The comment?

"Until 'brand x' realizes they only retain 33% of last year's buyer file and invests significantly in customer acquisition efforts, 'brand x" will continue to contract."

At this time I had worked with the brand for more than seven years.

I was asked to present my findings to several operational teams within the company. At the end of the day, the Executive Team gathered with the CEO. It was my job to explain my findings to the CEO.

The CEO did not like my message. He took umbrage with my comment that his brand would contract. He began to yell. His face reddened. He eventually slammed his fist on the table hard enough to cause tendon damage, telling me that I didn't understand business, that his team would crack the code for customer loyalty.

At this time, his annual rebuy rates had already declined by about five percentage points (i.e. from 45% to 40%) over a seven-year period of time. I decided to chime in. My comment would end our business relationship. Here's what I said.

• "You've already had seven years as CEO to crack the loyalty code. Instead, your rebuy rates have contracted over your tenure. What makes you think you the next seven years will be different?"

With that, I lost a lot of $$$, because this client was very good to me.

Would you want an analytics consultant to tell you the truth?

Or do you want an analytics consultant to make you feel good?

This CEO wanted the latter.

The problem, by the way, was not fixed. Even after a new Management Team took over.

You do not solve customer retention problems. I have a client who does an amazing job of getting as close as you can to solving customer retention problems. They've figured out the fusion of merchandising strategy and marketing targeting solutions. You CAN make a difference. You CAN'T solve the problem.

Your ability to retain your customer base is largely constrained by the merchandise you sell. If you sell stuff that doesn't sell well in summer, why would you retain customers in summer? And if you cannot retain customers in summer, why would your retention rate be high?

The business I'm talking about here had a season when the majority of their sales happened ... the customer simply didn't need their products or services year-round. By default, their business was calibrated to NOT retain customers each year.

Most of your businesses are calibrated to NOT retain customers. That's business - you succeed for other reasons!!!  You know this to be true if your average number of annual purchases per twelve-month buyer is under 2.0. Somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0 purchases per year is the spot where retention sings and loyalty becomes apparent.

No amount of fist-slamming fixes a retention problem. Only year-round appealing merchandise does that.

Your November / December Forecast

Let's try something ... contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and for a nominal fee I'll produce a forecast for three timeframes, based on how your customer file looks as of today. I mean, it is Forecast Season!

• Timeframe #1 = November before the day before Thanksgiving.
• Timeframe #2 = Cyber Window ... day before Thanksgiving to the Saturday after Cyber Monday.
• Timeframe #3 = Sunday after Cyber Monday - December 31.

If you have a customer file problem, I'll be able to expose it for you quickly (project turnaround would be in just a few days), allowing you to change your marketing investments to help meet your business goals during November / December.

Contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and I'll turn this one around for you quickly at a cost that you can literally Venmo me the funds.

The Hated Holiday

There's just nothing in ecommerce more rudimentary, nothing that shows your service provider doesn't truly understand business ... than the promotion of Cyber Monday.

Or worse, "BFCM" as the service provider industry calls it.

Yesterday I talked about "double dipping" ... the proven method of acquiring / converting customers in September / October so they are recent and active in November / December, thereby "double dipping" ... generating two orders in a short period of time.

What makes more sense to you?

• Acquire a customer or activate a customer in Sep/Oct and then get another quick purchase in Nov/Dec?
• Generate an order at 50% off and then the customer doesn't spend money on full priced merchandise the rest of the year while waiting for "BFCM" again? It's good business for service providers. It's not good business for you. Why give away all that gross margin to participate in a service provider holiday?

Have you ever asked yourself why Amazon might benefit from Prime Days in the first week of October? It's almost like they're trying to get customers to double-dip!

Double-Dip Season

As you likely know, in most cases you WANT to acquire a new customer in September or October.

Why?

You get to double-dip. 

When you acquire a customer on December 13, the customer is "done". The customer might purchase clearance products in January and might buy again in Spring (but probably won't buy again in Spring). From there, the customer largely goes dormant until the following November/December.

When you acquire a customer on October 13, the customer is "not done". When the customer is most likely to buy for a second time (the first ten weeks after a first purchase), you present the customer with November / December ... two months of amplified response. The customer quickly becomes a 2x buyer, and from there the customer is on the path to loyalty.

One of the easiest ways to build a loyal customer base is to acquire customers in Sep/Oct then send trigger-based email campaigns to customers through December to rapidly generate a second order. Many companies do this, it's highly effective, and it's highly profitable.

So go do it!!

Working With A Great Partner

When I worked at Eddie Bauer, I was part of what was called the "Catalog Business Team" ... CBT. It was our job to execute the catalog and ecommerce marketing, merchandising, inventory, creative, and operational team plans. Not being Lemonheads, we took our mandate further. We acted like we owned the catalog/ecommerce division, for good reason of course, because if we messed up, we were fired. Best to be fired setting the tone rather than following marching orders.

I was responsible for catalog marketing and analytics. My inventory partner was the best. We made the company a ton of money by working together, partnering on what our business / sales plan would be long before anybody else paid attention. By doing that, we had a solid plan when the Executives chose to pay attention. They nibbled around the edges of the plan, but the plan was truly our plan.

The most profit the catalog/ecommerce channel ever generated happened on our watch.

We partnered on dictating the merchandise assortment we'd feature in catalog and online. Back then the catalog drove everything, today it would be quite a different story. Let's pretend that last year's October catalog had the following composition.

• 24 pages of mens existing merch.
• 24 pages of mens new merch.
• 36 pages of womens existing merch.
• 36 pages of womens new merch.
• 8 pages of home.
• 8 pages of womens tailored merch.
• 136 pages total.

I would determine how many pages we could profitably mail next year, based on last year's productivity. Let's say I could only author 120 pages. My partner would go back and optimize performance of each category above based on last year's productivity, yielding a plan that might look like this.

• 16 pages of mens existing merch.
• 20 pages of mens new merch.
• 40 pages of womens existing merch.
• 36 pages of womens new merch.
• 4 pages of home.
• 4 pages of womens tailored merch.
• 120 pages total.

From here, I'd calculate the expected productivity of the pages. Fewer pages means less sales but better productivity. I'd calculate "merchandise productivity" ... showing that my partner's optimization resulted in each page being 10% more productive. Sales would decrease, but each page was more profitable. This allowed me to circulate deeper, converting more customers.

• Last Year:  3,000,000 catalogs at 136 pages, sales = $20,000,000. Demand per Thousand Pages Circulated = $49.02.
• Next Year:  3,500,000 catalogs at 120 pages, sales = $22,320,000. Demand per Thousand Pages Circulated = $53.14.
• Demand/Sales would be +12%, ad costs would be +3%, profit would increase by $700,000.

We replicated this for every catalog we'd mail, we'd adjust merchandise productivity and give direction to the nascent ecommerce team, our plan would fold into plans for the call center, the distribution center, for inventory buys, and it would give direction to our merchants and creative team.

There were two teams that generally argued with the plan.

1. The merchandising team.
2. The creative team.

The merchandising team did not like constraints ... constraints like "16 pages of mens existing merchandise". They wanted 32 pages. My partner and I would run the scenarios for everybody, showing how much sales/profit we'd give up adhering to their direction. To some extent this happens at every company, but disciplined companies push back when the merchants want "more".

The creative team did not like constraints. They wanted eight pages for "branding". No selling. We'd explain that was like flushing $80,000 of profit down the toilet. We'd ask the creative folks if they wanted to explain their ideas to the CEO. They didn't want to explain their ideas to the CEO.

There's nothing that destroys the profitability of an old-school catalog division like a creative director who wants to explore "branding".

But when you have a great business partner ... and the two of you work in lock-step ... you can achieve record profit.

Within a year I'd leave to work in the dot-com world (what ultimately became the 'retargeting' industry), watched my stock options go from 78 13/16 to 1, then accepted a job at Nordstrom, where I again had great partners (the merchant/creative person and the inventory person were both very good).

There are few things in business more enjoyable than working with great partners who have facts and work in lock-step with you to achieve great things ... and then great things happen.

Life of an Item

In case you are wondering why I'm talking about items / merchandise more often, this is a process that happens every 3-5 years. Business doesn't go the way we want it to, we focus on merchandise for awhile (which often fixes the problem), then we get away from merch and focus on marketing channels until marketing channels don't work great (usually caused by merchandise problems) ... and we repeat the cycle.

We're always repeating the cycle.

Sometimes our merchandise assortment gets stale. It happens to every company. It's during the "stale periods" when we dig a bit deeper.

Let's pretend you measure how much items sell by year ... let's pretend you've analyzed the dynamic for items you've offered for at least four years. You see the following.

• Intro Stub Year = $50,000 per item.
• First Full Year = $75,000.
• Second Full Year = $38,000.
• Third Full Year = $19,000.
• Fourth Full Year = $9,500.

The item essentially generates $191,000 over the stub year and first four years. You don't have unlimited warehousing space, so when an item dips below, say, $15,000, you discontinue the item and find something new. This means the life of the item is the stub year plus three full years.

Once you have a framework, you can identify the items in your assortment that are at the end of their life. You can communicate with your merchants that your customers need newness.

This is the point in the discussion where somebody will raise their hand and offer me advice:

• "I work in marketing, and I shouldn't have to deal with merchandise performance, that's why we have merchants. I should be allowed to focus on marketing."

Oh my little grasshopper.

Have you ever noticed that when business is off by 5% the Finance Team and the Merchant Team start asking questions about marketing? I notice it. It happens. All the time. It's happened for the thirty-six years I've been in this business. Marketers are constantly being fired for merchandising sins.

Checks and balances are important. You do not want to be held accountable because your merchandising partners held on to old products too long. Measure the life of an item, and focus on communication when you notice that products are aging, potentially harming customer response.

Assortment Age

If you want to understand if your customers are being impacted by your merchandise assortment, you can run my comp segment metrics (obviously) - you can run my Class Of Reporting (duh).

You can also measure what I call "Assortment Age".

Take every item a customer purchased in September, and for those items calculate the number of months that item has been available to be sold. If it were introduced fifteen months ago, the age of that item is 15 months. Perform this for every item you sell.

Compare September 2026 to September 2025, to September 2024. What is the average age of the assortment the customer purchased?

You might see something like this:

• 2026 = 13.2 Months.
• 2025 = 18.1 Month.
• 2024 = 13.6 Months.

The 2025 metric should set off all sorts of alarm bells.

There are a thousand reasons why an assortment ages or is immature. It's nearly impossible to balance the metric perfectly, teeter-totter style. Sometimes your assortment needs to be rebuilt and the assortment will be artificially "young".

If you have a month where results aren't ideal, go look at your merchandise assortment, calculate Assortment Age, and see what it tells you.

Email Messaging to Non-Fans

One of the challenges of ecommerce-in-a-box is that you work so hard to piece together a credible vendor solution (i.e. Shopify) that you don't stop to ask yourself how the customer sees the experience.

Example?

Friday Pickleball.

I was on the ground floor, watching their funny videos years ago.

I've spoken with the guys at a pickleball tournament. If you've never been to a PPA Tournament in Mesa (or elsewhere), by all means, open up your wallet and enjoy. You might see the guys there.

My wife paid $ to be coached by Kyle Koszuta. I've forwarded his videos to my audience at Pickleball Mathlete. We've watched him battle the pros in early rounds on Pickleball.TV. We've enjoyed watching Rachel Rohrabacher battle the best in the business, using their paddles as their first signed pro.

We took their Pickleball Personality Test.

We watched those guys as they changed their lives, moving to Phoenix to grow their careers.

Last week, I needed a new paddle ... I bought the Friday Aura to help protect my arm from tennis elbow.

You'd likely say I'm a "fan".

Their ecommerce-in-a-box solution doesn't know that. They've sent me two ecommerce-related messages since.

1. Please Become An Affiliate Marketer For Them.
2. The Message Below.

I just bought a paddle, and NOW you're going to tell me you'll help me find the right paddle?

Mind you, this doesn't change anything because I'm a fan. I'm with them.

The message is for you, it's illustrative for your business. The vast majority of your customers are not fans. Nope. Those who aren't fans don't want a "customer relationship". They want you to fulfill a want/need they have at a point-in-time. Telling them you can solve a problem hours after they purchase thinking they've already solved the problem is counter-productive. It's especially counter-productive because you are a small/scrappy brand using Shopify / Klaviyo so you can compete/beat somebody like Macy's ... only to have ecommerce-in-a-box fail you.

Again, I love what the Friday Pickleball folks are doing overall - I'm a fan, so I'm not going anywhere. Most of your customers are not fans, so the rules for those customers are different. Your messaging should reflect that fact, it needs to be more "on point" if you will.