The Plus/Minus Indicator

One of the most important variables in your customer database is the plus/minus indicator.

• Plus = Customer just did something positive (signed up for rewards, visited your website, viewed your community blog, put something in a shopping cart).
• Minus = Customer is about to fall from a good segment to a not-as-good segment.

The "plus" bump lasts about 30 days, sometimes more, most of the time less. You have a short window to do something with the positive action.

The "minus" indicator happens to all customers as they degrade and ultimately lapse. You want to prevent this continuous slide. When the customer is about to migrate from Loyal status to Quality status, the customer has a lower chance of repurchasing and consequently has lower long-term value (and therefore, requires you to find a new customer to make up the difference).

Action Streams apply to both plus and minus situations. You try to quickly convert a "plus" customer, you try to rescue the "minus" customer.

Does that make sense?

When you hire me for an Action Streams project, the plus/minus variable is probably the most important variable ... you use it to drive the Action Streams.

For Those Of You In The Print World

Not in the print world? You can skip, we'll see you tomorrow.

If you are mailing catalogs, you likely need to immediately evaluate three things.

1. How much money can you save (by sending fewer catalogs) while protecting top-line demand.
2. What the optimal Action Stream looks like from a print standpoint (i.e. how many times to mail a customer, annually).
3. What products align with print vs. the products that align with digital channels.

This was the #1 project request in 2024 (and that counts all the e-commerce brand analysis requests last year) ... some catalog brands got a significant head start and are making progress in 2025 ... transforming their businesses. I've seen the positive results in my Elite Program runs. It's happening ... the future is out there, waiting to be written.

Here's three ways that catalog-centric brands are working with me in 2025.

1. Full Catalog Action Stream and Code To Update Your Database As You Wish. Cost = $30,000.
2. Half Catalog Action Stream and Digital Action Stream Analysis ... you don't get the code, you do get to learn how often you should be mailing customers, you learn products that align with print vs. digital, and you'll get the Action Segments and Plus/Minus variable used in Action Streams. Cost = $22,000.
3. Half Catalog Action Stream Project (Most Popular Last Year) ... you learn how often to mail customers, you learn the products that align with print vs. digital, you get a forecast for where your business is likely to head as a consequence. Cost = $15,000.

My calendar generally fills up fast in April, once clients see that they're going to have problems making their p&l work during the fiscal year. So get ahead of the curve and contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com). Full product offering can be observed here. This is looking like one of those years where you're dealing with a bit of uncertainty. 

Booklet Update

I promised you there was a companion booklet forthcoming on the topic of Action Streams. I've got a few things going on require attention for about a week. After that I'll work on getting the text published. Thanks for your patience, it's coming, ok?

Product Offering Update

You can visit the "Hire Kevin" page (click here) to learn about my current project offering.

The document has been updated with Action Streams!

• Here's what you get in an Action Streams Project.
• Research into Whether Your Lapsed Buyers are Willing to Reactivate (this is the Reactivation Project work conducted last fall).
• Analysis of Impact of Recent Website Visits on Reactivation (if appropriate).
• Proprietary Action Segments ... Elite, Loyal, Quality, Average, Struggling, Lapsed Spend $, Lapsed Experiment, Lapsed Save $.
• Attribute Table to Leverage Action Streams (Primary / Secondary Merchandise Category Preference, Primary / Secondary Marketing Channel Preference)
• Creation of Mini-Assortments for Action Stream Purposes (i.e. the products that customers who purchase via email or print or search or social tend to prefer).
• Price Band Preference for Each Customer for Action Stream Purposes.
• Plus/Minus Indicator Telling if a Customer is About to Fall Out of an Action Segment or is Responsive Due to a Website Visit.

Action Streams are the logical outcome of the Reactivation work performed last year. Your email service provider likely can implement this framework to help you implement Action Streams.

Let's get busy ... contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) to get started.

Get Your Tickets Now, Limited Seats are Available

In the real world, sellouts are important. Really important. You want a full arena/stadium. Soccer in the US learned this lesson. Instead of having 27,000 people in a stadium of 70,000, they built a bunch of 20,000 - 30,000 seat stadiums that fill up. Now you have fomo (fear of missing out).

At the PPA pro pickleball event in Mesa last week, you could buy one of two ticket packages for Thursday Round of 16 Play.

• $25 to walk the grounds (where pros played on three courts).
• $40 to sit at Center Court and walk the grounds if you so desired.

I spent $25 because I like to walk the grounds. On Center Court? Here's the view from outside the court, where you could look-in but not enter.

Yeah, it was full and it was loud. You could hear the cheers from all across the grounds.

Now, that's maybe a 1,000 seat court (many seats are blocked off to help the players see the ball better). They probably could have sold 2,500 seats. But by having a limited supply of tickets, you fill the place up and create fomo / buzz.

What comparable situation do you have in your e-commerce business? If you are struggling to answer that question, you are part of the problem.

If you expect to sell 100 widgets, you are always better off buying 75 widgets and selling out and creating fomo with your customer base than you are having 140 widgets then selling 105 of them and having to liquidate 35 (but yeah, they're available in all channels, so #omnichannel) at half-off thereby diluting your pricing authority.

And if you expect to sell 100 widgets, why not tell the customer you only have 75 of 'em, and then use an ACTION STREAM to communicate that you now have 45 of 'em, and then 25 of 'em, then create a contest to predict when you'll sell out of 'em? Why not? What stops you from doing that?

Fashion brands have been doing this forever.

Are you ever worried that Macy's will run out of ... anything?

One of the most interesting meetings I was ever in during my corporate days was at about 7:00pm at night ... two merchants just going at each other. One merchant advocated having 1,000 dresses forecasted perfectly, available in each channel. #omnichannel! The other merchant argued that you buy 500 dresses when you know you can sell 1,000 of 'em and you sell through them quickly and set the expectation with the customer that if the customer doesn't act with any sense of urgency the customer will be perpetually out of luck.

• Merchant #1 was ultimately fired.
• Merchant #2 was proven right, repeatedly.

Go to the Hot Deals page on Headphones.com (it's sorted from best seller to worst seller). Look at all of the sold out or backordered items. They're teaching you to act now.

Create some urgency, folks!

The Case

Here's the case for both Customer Acquisition and Action Streams.

Prices

Prices are likely to increase in the next year, due to cost of goods increases and/or tariffs. If your prices increase 20%, you'll likely see a corresponding decrease in units ... could be 3%, could be 20%. Higher prices mean lower rebuy rates, lower reactivation rates, and fewer new customers. Hint - in 2025 and beyond, you'll need customers. Prices will conspire against your efforts to increase customers. Action Streams are a way to address customers who show interest in your brand.

Paid Search, Paid Social

In project after project, these customers have lower long-term value. Not bad long-term value, but lower. When customers have lower long-term value, you need more of 'em to protect your future. As you need more customers, others figure out they need more customers. This drives up the cost of advertising, potentially driving down response. Action Streams will be a tool used to close the deal on infrequent buyers who re-engage with your brand via Paid Search and Paid Social.

Old-School Catalog

Will be a piece of the marketing puzzle among 60-84 year old customers who are Elite or Loyal. Customer Acquisition or Reactivation via print? Over. Done. Too expensive. Customers 18-59 could care less. Believe it or not, there are catalog Action Streams that can work with 60-84 year old customers. Your old hotline program falls into this category.

The Customer/Prospect Ecosystem

Paid Search represents a micro-interaction ... the customer wants a GREEN WIDGET, a highly specific micro-request. We've spent 25 years figuring out how to capitalize on a specific micro-request. We'll spend more time in the next 25 years understanding how the customer interacts with our brand and our competitors in the Customer/Prospect Ecosystem. Data from customer interactions in this ecosystem become highly important ... for instance, the 18 month buyer who suddenly visits your website ... that customer is responsive for a short period of time and requires an Action Stream to convert.

Events

Events "seed" the customer/prospect ecosystem. Since Nordstrom has few sales events, their Anniversary Sale in July/August means something. It's an event! In my world of Headphones, the CanJam events mean something. They become part of the marketing calendar. They generate interest and interactions within your customer/prospect ecosystem. Attention shifts to you. Attention shifts away from your competition. In the next five years, you will see a shift from "campaigns" to "events", with Action Streams replacing campaigns.

Sports

Sports represent the future of e-commerce events. Anything "in person" has to be pretty special in order to cause a customer to pay money for an experience. Modern retail is "not special" ... it's like the old County Stadium in Milwaukee. We'll invest in "real life" activities that build toward something (like Spring Training to the Regular Season to the Playoffs to the World Series in Baseball). As we build toward something, we'll use Action Streams to promote events in real life.

AI

As we shift from campaigns to events, Action Streams replace campaigns. Today your Action Streams are likely driven by humans. In the future a fusion of AI and your smarts will result in smarter Action Streams. Times are changing, we'll change with 'em.

The Easiest Starting Point?

Take all customers who have not purchased in six or more months, and segment them by whether the customer visited your website in the past month or not.

The Case

The end of old-school customer acquisition paired with rising prices and excessive digital marketing competition results in you, the reader, making the case for using Action Streams and Events to better relate to your customer/prospect ecosystem.

Who Do I Pay?

When a conference recently asked me to pay five-figures to speak to an audience of a few hundred professionals, mostly third-party service providers, I presented an alternate case.

• "Why would I pay five figures to speak to maybe 75 decision makers when I interact with my community of anywhere between five hundred and ten thousand professionals (depending on the content) on a daily basis at no cost to me?"

Let's just say the "alternate case" didn't go very far.

In fact, whenever I communicate the concept of building a community (i.e. best customer and prospect list) so you don't have to pay a third party for access to anything, I get the "Ed Bowling" response.

At a conference, a Marketing Executive looked me in the eyes and earnestly issued a memorable sentence.

• "I just want you to tell me what the next big thing is so I can pay for it to scale my business."

Come on. The marketing executive was not willing to do any work. None. She wanted me to tell her something for free, something she could throw money at so her business would thrive and she'd look good.

Her business recently announced that it was shutting down.

Do you want to know what offends so many of my readers? They're offended when I talk about the marketing brilliance of Headphones.com ... especially readers who advocate a "pay to play" style of marketing (i.e. give Google money, Google gives you clicks). Think about what they've done.

• 500,000+ registered community users (i.e. a prospect list), plus all the data of what each registered community user is interested in / reads / views, paired with an Action Stream of email/text featuring items/content that relates to the content the registered community user interacts with. You could do that, right? What stops you from doing that?
• Nearly 200,000 subscribers to YouTube reviews, content, and the weekly podcast (a three-hour show published live nearly every Saturday and then recorded for everybody else).
• At least a half-dozen hired in-house influencers who produce content ... hundreds of articles and videos. They know their products. Their editors/producers make it look professional.
• Mid-eight-figures in annual net sales of items that can be purchased easily on Amazon for the same price and delivered by Amazon days earlier. There is a disincentive to buy from this brand, and yet customers accept the disincentive.
• A 365 day returns policy (vs. 30 days on Amazon).

I mean, 500,000 registered users ... that's your prospect list, right there (plus your most active customers to boot ... they're teaching your prospects on your behalf). And you know exactly what they are interested in in-between purchases ... you can act upon it. Would you rather act upon that or act upon some rando who typed the word "WIDGET"? (and yes, the answer can be you'd like to do both).

All of that represents modern e-commerce.

None of that represents paying Google money.

None of that represents paying Facebook money.

All of that represents putting Google/Facebook to work FOR YOU, not the other way around.

Still ... here's the feedback I generally get.

You can build a team with modern in-house marketing expertise, paying them to do brilliant work building your own community (i.e. your own prospect list).

Or you can rent temporary access to your own customers and prospects, enriching Google/Facebook in the process.

You have choices. Who should you pay?