The Christmas curse of the ‘one-timer’ - and what to do about it.
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One of the earliest demographic studies was Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662) by haberdasher John Graunt.
The study contained a form of life table which revealed that one third of the children in London died before their sixteenth birthday. Now widely regarded as the Father of Modern Demographics, thousands of scholars and industry practitioners have built upon his foundations.
Marketers in particular.
In the 1970s, when the term ‘Baby Boomers’ was first coined, it became common to group consumers by their demographics and market to these separate cohorts and today many organisations still define their customers in this manner. Understandably so, particularly as market research comes packaged in demographic groupings – gender, age, location.
But just think for a moment about how you define yourself. It is a rare event that I think of myself as a card carrying member of Generation X. I am far more likely to describe myself by my lifestyle and behaviours: foodie, hotel aficionado, business owner. These are meaningful associations that are personal to me and are far more likely to drive my purchasing decisions than the fact that I am the wrong side of 21 and male.
Of course this isn’t earth shattering stuff. Behaviour driven segmentation is not something new and in fact research by Marketing Week found that 91 percent of marketers believe that behaviour is the most effective method of segmentation. The problem, however, is compiling the insight to define the behaviours that are most going to benefit the business. No one said it was going to be easy!
To understand how the ‘right’ behaviours can be identified it is necessary to first diagnose the business problem that the behaviours are going to help solve.
A key one right now in retail, for instance, is the prevalence of one-timers. These are people that have shopped with you once, but haven’t returned. And when better than to reactivate them than the festival holiday season?
That’s exactly what we did for a global beauty brand.
We realised that we could quickly boost the bottom line at minimal cost and improve brand loyalty by increasing second-time purchases by 10 percent.
To do this we knew we needed to deliver individualised content pertinent to every recipient in real time, based on their previous behaviour.
To very much simplify our process we defined the one-time purchasers as either engaged (someone that had interacted with the brand in the last month) or unengaged. Then this was layered with transactional, propensity and intent data in order to determine the content that each person received.
For instance, an engaged customer who had recently purchased a product as a gift and had browsed on the website would be served an email highlighting alternative products. Whilst an unengaged customer that hadn’t responded to a previous email might be offered the chance to attend a free online fragrance workshop to help build a stronger brand bond.
However, what truly set this campaign apart was that creative content was served on opening of the email, rather than when it was sent. This meant that the messages would be relevant to the recipient no matter when the email was opened, as it would be based on real-time behaviour. Therefore, if an email was sent on a Tuesday evening, but the person was undergoing an inbox detox for a few days and didn’t open the email until the following Wednesday, the content could potentially be different than if it had been opened as soon as it was received. This is because in the intervening eight days the customer may have browsed online for candles and therefore the content would reflect this, rather than the fragrances that they had looked at a few weeks earlier. We created 638 unique pieces of content tailored to an individual’s customer journey in real time. And our success rate was 22 percent above the original target demonstrating the power of behaviour-based campaigning.
So the key steps in converting one-timers into repeat buyers are:
Interrogate the database to identify key behavioural traits
Overlay traits with additional data to create distinct cohorts - be aware that there will run into the hundreds if not thousands!
Produce content relevant to each cohort
Serve the content in a meaningful way - remember right channel, right time
If you have a significant proportion of one-timers in your customer database and would like help converting them into second, third and fourth time shoppers this Christmas don’t hesitate to give us a shout. We’d love to help!