Ecommerce merchants try their best to offer the best shopping experience to all their customers. After all, getting them to register or purchase a product may have cost them a significant amount of money. So, they want to make sure each and every customer receives the best treatment and is incentivized to purchase more.
However, not all customers are the same. Some will make small purchases for a variety of reasons – maybe because they have limited budgets, they are afraid to make large purchases on the web, or they just don’t need more things to buy. While there are other customers that make big purchases or a lot of small ones (which accumulate to a large amount). Do you think both types of customers should be treated in the same manner? The Pareto Principle
The pareto principle is a common marketing theory for understanding the impact of different consumers on your business. Known also as the 80/20 rule, it suggests that one-fifth of a product’s buyers are responsible for four-fifths of sales. This of course may not be exactly the case for all stores, but even if your top 20% customers are responsible for 50% of your sales, you still need to take this into account.
Why do you need to treat your best customers differently?
There are many reasons for treating your best customers differently. Here are some examples and I am sure there are many others:
- Enhance their loyalty – even if your best customers like your store and/or your products, enhancing their loyalty is extremely important, especially in a competitive market. This will give them additional reasons to stick to your brand and purchase your products. If you think about it, it’s always painful to lose a customer, but losing a top customer will hurt much more.
- Leverage their affinity to increase sales even further – your top customers love coming back and making repeat purchases. But this doesn’t mean they can’t purchase even more. Since you have their affinity, luring them back with incentives is much easier compared to regular or occasional customers.
- Preferential treatment can incentivate regular customers – a classic example are airlines. Today all airlines have multi-tiered frequent traveler loyalty clubs, offering upgrades and other amenities to their most frequent travelers. These multi-tiered rewards programs incentivizes customers to buy more and climb their way up to the next tier.
- Top customers are more likely to refer additional customers – top customers receive preferential treatment are more likely to express their gratitude by spreading the word around.
Valuable feedback – top customers who enjoy your products can provide valuable feedback as to the reasons they enjoy it so much, as well as constructive criticism that can be extremely helpful.
How Remarkety can help you provide preferential treatment to your top customers
Remarkety lets you increase sales from customers and prospects by sending automated emails based on customers’ behavior and purchase history. With Remarkety you can automatically win back inactive customers, recover abandoned carts, turn members into customers, increase repeated sales, incentivize clients with reward programs, and much more. As part of Remarkety you can also provide preferential treatment to your top customers automatically.
Multiple definitions for top customers
The definition of your top customers can vary. Depending on your marketing strategy, you may view your top customers as:
- Customers who have spent over a certain amount
- Customers that have made over a certain amount of purchases
- Customers who have purchased certain products or purchased from a certain category of products
Remarkety supports these models across all the remarketing activities, by simply adding these conditions to the various campaigns.
Rewards program campaigns
Just like in the example of the airlines, you can use Remarkety to set up multi-tiered loyalty programs. As Remarkety constantly analyzes your store’s data it can offer different incentives, such as coupons, for the next purchase. Through the use of smart tags, Remarkety allows you to include, in the email itself, the number of purchases or the amount spent so far, while reminding the customer that they are x amount of purchases away from the next tier (which will entitle them to a larger discount).
Email example with multi-tiered rewards program
You can set up Rewards program (total amount spent) or Rewards program (number of orders) campaigns. To build multi-tiered programs you simply create multiple instances of these campaigns and configure the condition for the total number of orders or the total amount spent as greater than/smaller than according to the tiers that you want to set up.
This marketing tactic is extremely effective and encourages customers to purchase more and remain loyal to your store.
Adding preferential treatment to additional campaigns
For each campaign that you setup, you can define conditions for preferential treatment of top customers. After all, any interaction is an opportunity to let them know that you value their business, to incentivize them to purchase more, etc. Here are some examples of how you can add these conditions to the various campaigns:
- Order follow-up – Sending a follow-up email after purchase is important for all customers. You can use it to provide an incentive to come back and purchase more, ask for feedback, display product recommendations, and more. But Remarketylets you also send different follow-up emails to top customers (by simply setting a condition). After a top customer has made a purchase, send them a thank you email with something special. It could be a gift or an incentive to make another purchase. You can of course use the special tag to remind them of the amount of orders that they made, incentivize them to reach a certain goal (e.g. you are two purchases away from receiving x), and more.
- Abandoned carts – top customers also abandon their carts. So when you remind them they left their cart behind, you can use this opportunity to remind them that they are a preferred customer and incentivize them to complete their checkout process.
Setting conditions for defining messages to top customers
There is a wide variety of conditions, including top customers for a certain product or category
There is a wide variety of conditions, including top customers for a certain product or category
- Feedback requests – asking for feedback is important for all customers, but if you use this opportunity to let your top customers become especially involved, you can turn them into your brand’s ambassadors. Let them know that as top/platinum members/clients you want to hear their opinions. You may ask them specific questions, for example, about your checkout process, etc.
- Inactive customers – although, at first glance, this type of campaign is not suited for top customers, but you must remember that even customers who have spent large amounts may become dormant for a while. With Remarkety you can set up a condition that if an inactive customer is a top customer (spent more than a certain amount, or by the number of purchases), they will receive a different email. This allows you to be more relevant to them, because the reasons for inactivity can be very different for relatively new customers versus those that have made many purchases.
These are just a few examples of what you can do to provide preferred treatment to your top customers. Remarkety can help you automatically identify these customers and send them the most relevant messages. By doing so, you will enhance your relationships with them, incentivize others to reach this status, and increase sales.
