Marketers who are data-driven and thought leaders pay close attention to their most active customers. Through good times, and bad, they are the ones who are perpetuating your business.
Coming off the heels of the massive wave of digital growth in 2020 where ecommerce grew by 43%, understanding what contributed to that growth on your brand is essential to continue momentum in 2021.
It is also important to be able to juxtapose that growth to businesses that are comparable to yours in the industry, you need to know where to find that growth, and to do so, you’ll need a very important formula.
The Formula
The first place you’ll want to start is your brand value, which is simply the sum of your customer relationships.
So, here’s the formula for customer-centric growth:
[Active Customer Growth x Active Customer Value Growth]
It’s imperative that you get to know your active customers – defined as those shoppers who are visiting your site or engaging with your marketing efforts on a regular basis.
For very obvious reasons, 2020 was unique, as there was a bigger audience in digital when many companies decided to pivot and take their businesses virtual. The increase in the number of active customers carried 91%* of digital’s growth.
Nurturing Active Customers
At this point, you may be asking yourself, once I’ve identified my active shoppers, then what? They’re active shoppers, so I don’t need to pursue them any further, they’ve discovered my business and made a purchase, done and done, right? Wrong! This is where you cannot rest on your laurels.
Don’t be misled by the notion that once you’ve accumulated active shoppers, it means you know them and know what their needs are. Once you start to know your shoppers, it’s time to follow through and prove that you recognize them on a more personal level.
This is your opportunity to really demonstrate to your customers that you are responsive to their needs. It’s time to employ all the insights, predictions and observations generated by your data by activating:
- Product recommendations
- Predicted time to next purchase
- Categories and brands that they are fans of
- And so much more…
Use all of that data above to your advantage as you actively interact with your customers.
This is the time to leverage all of your brands’ data by conducting outreach campaigns with personalized content and messaging. This way, the shopper will feel they’re experiencing a more intimate purchasing experience by your brand and not just blindingly being marketed to with items that wouldn’t appeal to them. Let the data help you stand apart from your competitors.
Going Forward
Now that we’re well into the first quarter of 2021, we’ve adapted to this new world of increased digital engagement and shopping. It’s important to keep nurturing your relationships with active customers as well as pursuing potential new prospects to sustain your business’ full growth potential.
As you grow, you need to keep crunching the numbers on your customer-centric growth to continue expanding customer value and converting your one-time shoppers into repeat buyers.
To learn more about Zaius’ Customer Lifecycle Benchmark, click here.
* Data sourced from the shopping activity of more than 600 million customers, spending more than $3 billion online.
