My ecommerce customer is called Susan – or is she?
October 29, 2009
We all have an idea of who our customer is, but how many of us actually test that and analyse the data. I have recently been looking at our customer’s ecommerce customers and found out some amazing things. In this post I am going to give you a powerful strategy to uncover who your exact customer is.
Lets say you sell baby products and so you think ‘well my customers are young mothers and relatives of young mothers’. So you would go after all these customers with you marketing. So you look at keywords for mothers on PPC and you target search engine optimisation for new mothers etc. You think about magazines they are reading and then you try an ad in a magazine, it gets a few sales but not enough to justify it long term.
In fact thats the problem, your pay per click does convert but your cost per conversion is too high so it is not really cost effective. Your search engine terms are very competitive and so it is really hard to get on page one. Not many people sign up to your newsletter list, you know you have good products but you just need better marketing right?
Well you would half right.
The thing is everyone in your industry does the same thing, they just ‘think’ about their target market and go after it. All the people selling baby goods go after young mothers on masse and so only those with high average order values can compete. No one usually thinks in more detail about their customer (and it is not really something you can think about you have to let the data tell you).
If you do not get your customer profile right and nailed down then your ecommerce site is going to stuggle. Once you have it then you can really ramp up sales.
What you need to do is to find out your ‘Customer Avatar’ this is a customer profile of your ideal customer. You should give you ideal customer a name and know their age, where they work, what they do for a living, how much they earn where they hang out, what magazine they read etc. You need to know enough about them so that every time you have a new marketing campaign you can ‘have a conversation’ with your customer avatar and see if it fits them. If you called your customer avatar ‘susan’ ask ‘would Susan buy this?’
Your customer avatar will be the set of shared characteristics that your largest group of ideal customers shares. Obviously all customers will be different in some way but they will share common attributes.
This is how I find the customer avatar for my clients.
I run a survey all year round asking prospects and customers to fill in some key questions about themselves in return for an incentive. The incentive is a money off voucher or something worthwhile that buyers will be interested in. The survey asks questions about age, children…whatever is relevant to that customer, but more importantly it finds out information that I can use later on. I need to know information that allows me to target more of my ideal customers, so I want to know what websites they use, what magazines they read, what hobbies they do – basically where they hang out. If I know this then I can focus my advertising in these places. Also very importantly I need to find out ‘why they buy’ what is the hook that brings these people in and what makes them buy.
Once I have about 300 survey responses I then run a comparison against the email address to see which customers buy the most. I want to find out the difference between the customers that come and buy one low priced product and those that buy high prices products many times a year. By comparing the two I can see exactly what customers I need to find more of.
With this information I am not targeting eg. all new mothers, but new mothers who live in the south of england and have a household income of over x. Therefore my marketing can become much more refined and targeted and this brings my cost per conversion down for all my marketing activities.
Each time I get a new 300 entrants I repeat the analysis to see what has changed. Ecommerce marketing should be easy and it should work, I hope this helps you get more sales.
Thank you
Mark Hammersley