Success with customer relationship management requires customer segmentation. This is the third of three posts on improving your business relationship with customers through segmentation.

The first post dealt with segmenting by buying behavior. You can access it below:

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Buying Behavior

The second post dealt with segmenting by purchasing frequency. You can link to it below:

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Frequency Of Purchases

Today’s post deals with improving your success with customer relationship management by segmenting with the demographics of customers.

Success With Customer Relationship Management Using Demographics

The more you know about your customers, the better your customer relationships will be.

That’s why I believe it’s important to collect demographic information about your customers and use it in your customer relationship marketing.

Demographics reveal a wealth of information about people. For example, just knowing their age range reveals their generation and life stage. Both of these in return tell you loads about your customers’ attitudes, opinions, values, and concerns.

Once you know this type of information about your customers, you can improve your customer service experience and increase your number of loyal customers, who buy from you again and again.

You can collect demographic information with customer surveys or contests. Then you can segment your customers by their demographics.

This provides the same advantages for marketing to customers as it does for marketing to target markets. By better understanding them, you can create messages and offers that they find relevant and reach them through media that they pay attention to.

Success With Customer Relationship Management: A Free Report On Segmenting By Demographics

If you want to learn more about how to segment your customers using demographics, you can get my free report by completing the form below:

By using the three types of customer segmentation covered in this series of posts, you can achieve more success with customer relationship management.

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Posted 8-15-08: Success With Customer Relationship Management Using Demographics

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Success with customer relationship management can enhance your marketing if you use market segmentation to provide customized services and offers to your customers.

This series of posts covers three ways to segment customers. I covered segmenting by your customers’ buying behavior yesterday. You can access it by clicking the link below.

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Buying Behavior

Today’s post will cover segmenting by your customer’s frequency of purchases, and tomorrow’s post will cover segmenting by demographics. If you’re coming here after it’s published, you can access it from the link below:

Success With Customer Relationship Management Using Demographics

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Frequency of Purchases

The frequency of purchases that you can expect from your customers depends on the type of products or services that you sell.

Success With Customer Relationship Management For High Frequency Purchasers

Consumable products have the highest frequency of purchases. If you sell consumable products such as cosmetics, food, and vitamins, your good customers should buy several times per year. For some products, they’ll buy monthly.

You should keep records of what your customers buy and let them know when their favorite products are going to go on sale or be a part of a special promotion.

By emailing them or sending them a card about the sale or promotion, you are providing them a service that they will appreciate. Plus you are getting them into your store again, where they will often by additional products. It’s a win-win situation.

Success With Customer Relationship Management For Medium Frequency Purchasers

Good customers buy other products less frequently because they just don’t need them as often. These products include clothing, costume jewelry, small appliances and small electronic items.

Good customers in this category generally buy a couple of times per year. You can encourage them to make both purchases with your business by emphasizing new and fresh items and by informing them of discounts and sales.

Again email and direct mail work effectively to inform them of new products and new opportunities to save on products.

Success With Customer Relationship Management For Low Frequency Purchasers

If you sell expensive products that people don’t need to replace very often, they will naturally buy from you less. For instance, if you sell furniture or large appliances, your customers won’t repeat their purchases until years later.

However, they may buy other related products if you keep in touch with them and offer them great customer service on their purchases.

For example, a customer who buys a refrigerator may need a dishwasher the same year. A customer who buys a bedroom set may need linens for the bed soon.

Success With Customer Relationship Management By Frequency Of Purchasers – Conclusion

By keeping in touch with your customers you improve customer relations while also improving your sales.

Your customers will appreciate knowing that you are thinking about them “after the sale.” They will likely purchase again because you have customized your offers and communications to them according to their prior purchasers.

Because customized offers build more loyal customers, you get more repeat business. Because you treat each customer as someone who is special and important to your business, you also increase your success with customer relationship management.

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Success With Customer Relationship Management By Frequency of Purchases

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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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