Success with customer relationship management requires segmenting customers so that you can communicate relevant offers to them.

You can segment customers by:

Their buying behavior,

Their frequency of purchases, and

Their demographics.

This is the first of three posts on how to improve your success with customer relationship management by segmenting your customers. You can access the next in this series by clicking on the link below:

Success With Customer Relationship Management: Segmenting By Frequency Of Purchases

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Buying Behavior

This post covers segmenting your customers by buying behavior. It includes terms from an article by Ken Burke in the August 2008 issue of Target Marketing These terms are:

Lapsed buyers

Traditional loyalists, and

Brand advocates

Success With Customer Relationship Management For Lapsed Buyers

Lapsed buyers are customers who haven’t bought from you for a specific period of time. That time is a period that you set because it makes sense for your business.

Lapsed customers have purchased one of your products or your service already. And although they haven’t purchased for a while, they know your brand. Unless they have had a negative experience with your brand, it will be easier to get them to buy again than it will be to get a new customer.

If you’ve kept records on what and when they bought and what they paid for it, you can determine whether they paid full price or bought because you were offering a discount.

Those who paid full price are more likely to buy another product at full price. For those who bought at a discount, you’ll need to offer a similar discount to get them to buy again.

Success With Customer Relationship Management For Traditional Loyalists

Traditional loyalists are customers who have bought often from you and usually paid full price for their purchases. They like your brand and have already demonstrated loyalty to it with repeat purchases.

These are your best customers. They have the highest lifetime value so you need to really treat them special. Make them a part of a select community reserved just for them. Help them to feel like they belong in the community and are an important part of your business.

Inviting them to sales is not as important as involving them in special events like a time when your store is opened only to them. You can also make them feel special by assigning a representative that they can ask for by name who provides additional services that other customers may not get.

Success With Customer Relationship Management For Brand Advocates

Brand advocates are customers who have learned about your brand through interaction with other customers or your business representatives.

Maybe a friend recommended your business, or they met you on an Internet social networking site, or they know you personally from face-to-face social networking.

Because of their affiliation with your business, they like you and your brand so they chose to do business with you.

Although these customers may have purchased only once from you, they have the potential to be traditional loyalists so they should be segmented separately and pursued with promotions that further enhance their perception of your brand.

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Buying Behavior - Conclusion

It’s simple to segment these types of customers from your customer data. Yet these three segments enable you to connect to your customers in a way that relates to their buying behavior and their relationship to your business.

By treating each differently and providing each what they want, you will have more success with customer relationship management.

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Posted 8-13-08:Success With Customer Relationship Management:
Segmenting By Buying Behavior

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Last Friday, my market segmentation post dealt with cultural expressions and leisure activities as applied to dancing. You can access it below:

Market Segmentation and Dance Styles?

Today I want to discuss leisure activities some more and reveal my favorite ones.

My Leisure Activities

I like landscaping and home improvement. My husband, Jim, and I
spend many weekends in these “leisure” activities.

I put leisure in quote marks because these activities involve a lot of physical work. Of course after sitting in front of a computer for 50 or so hours every week, I welcome the physical exercise.

But my favorite leisure activity is going couple, country dancing.
It also involves physical exercise and so much more. It’s stress
relieving. It’s romantic. It’s totally not work or expensive. And
it’s just plain fun.

Plus, Jim likes it as much as I do, so he’s
always ready for a good Friday night on the dance floor.

We usually go early so we have the dance floor much to ourselves.
Then we leave early while the drunks are still at the clubs instead
of on the streets.

What Leisure Activities Can Tell You

These leisure activities tell you quite a bit about me: I like
physical exercise, dancing, country music, to work outside, and to
have fun. I need some stress relieve. I’m a romantic at heart, and
I prefer to avoid crowds.

Knowing the leisure activities of your target market reveals much about their interests and provide good marketing appeals. So leisure activities should be a part of your market segmentation research.

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Posted 5-30-08: Market Segmentation
and Leisure Activities

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A final consideration in determining the criteria necessary for a market segment is how you define a market segment.

Market Segment Definitions Vary

Many marketing experts define a market segment like a target market. So when they refer to a market segment, they mean the target market for a specific campaign.

I use slightly different terminology that comes from my public relations background. Instead of referring to a specific market within the mass market as a segment, I refer to that market as a target market. Likewise, instead of using market segment to refer to a target market, I use it to refer to a demographic variable, from which psychographic and behavioral variables can be determined.

You may notice my different use of terms when reading my special report on my

Matrix Market Segmentation Process.

This process simplifies the market’s segmentation. It starts with facts
(demographics) that most business owners have about their markets and uses a systematic process to determine personality (psychographics) and behavioral characteristics.

It enables you to gather significant information about a target market without the technical skills, computer software and statistics required for so many other market segmentation processes.

By considering all the characteristics across different segments, you can determine four to five shared characteristics that will effectively communicate with and relate to members of the market segment.

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Posted 5-29-08: Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment:
Market Segment Definition

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Latino medical marketing is the subject of my brand new site. And although I hardly ever do two posts in one day, I just couldn’t wait to tell you about it. It’s called Hispanic Latino Medical Marketing with a .com suffice.

Although targeted to physicians, anyone interested in marketing to Hispanics and Latinos will find it insightful. So far I just have six real content pages on the new site, and some other obligatory pages, but I’ll be developing many more, working between my regular blogs on this site.

The home page of HispanicLatinoMedicalMarketing.com covers marketing strategies and tactics that should be considered in developing a Latino medical marketing program. You can check it out through the link in this paragraph.

The second page provides Five Tips On Hispanic Marketing For Doctors. This helps improve Hispanic marketing for doctors, and you can get to it from the link above.

The third page, Latino Marketing For Medical Practices: 3 Ideas You Can Implement
discusses three ideas that doctors can use as they implement Latino marketing for medical practices.

The fourth page, Latino Marketing For Physicians, examines three questions that should be considered before physicians plan a Latino marketing campaign.

The fifth page is a copy of an article that I submitted to Ezine.Articles.com. Latino Marketing For Physician Practices Guides 1-4 covers four of seven major Latino market segments.

The sixth page continues the fifth one, Latino Marketing For Physician Practices Guides 5-7 defines five through seven Latino market segments introduced in the Ezine Article.

The seventh page, Hispanic Marketing For Medical Practices covers insurance and health conditions of Hispanic adults and children.

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Posted: 5-28-08: Latino Medical Marketing
- New Site

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This is my third post on the criteria necessary for a market segment

A Market Segment Must Comprise Potential Customers

The market segment that you select to target must contain the people that you believe are most likely to buy your products or services.

A Market Segment Must Be Large Enough To Turn A Profit

It must also be large enough, that if only a small percentage of it’s members purchase, you will still make a profit. That means that you will make enough money to pay for the marketing campaign and still make a large enough profit to warrant the time and other resources invested.

Your Price Must Be Profitable

This requires that you consider how you price your products and services. Your prices must produce a profit if you get a specific number of projected sales. Don’t forget as you set your price to include the the cost of your marketing campaign.

If you want to learn more about pricing, click on the price category in the right sidebar and you’ll access several of my posts on pricing.

Assuring that the market segment is large enough to be profitable is the last of the criteria necessary for a market segment. Measuring and identifying the people in a market segment provides the third of five criteria necessary for a market segment.

But I do have one more thing to tell you about criteria necessary for a market segment. You can access that post below:

Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: Market Segment Definition

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Posted 5-28-08: Criteria Necessary For A Market Segment: :
Profit Potential

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