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Thinking about how your customers engage with your business
by Nick Shanagher on 2 February, 2010
In my business we have strategies to acquire and keep customers, as proposed by Peter Drucker.
We have a group of customers that we believe are fans who tell other customers about the things that we do well and who give us great feedback. We have many loyal customers who buy our weekly magazine, respond to our advertisers announcements and to our campaigns, and who use our products and services to promote what they do. And we have targets, potential customers who we think will benefit from using our products but who currently do not.
Using this simple segmentation model, we organise ourselves so that we deliver better content, so that we understand who we are writing for, and we plan marketing to explain the benefits that our products provide. We invest time in researching what our readers say they want (attitude) and what information and news they actually use (behaviour) and we design our products to maximise the benefit to them.
This may be a model that shop owners could use for their own businesses by segmenting your shoppers into two groups and then thinking about ways to convert passers-by and other local people into shoppers.
In the early 1990s one supermarket group carried out a similar exercise when it was considering shutting down a store in central London. What it found out was that people who used its shop wanted to buy things for their lunch, top up shopping, and there were enough of them to build a good business – perhaps the start of the convenience revolution.
Putting customers at the centre of our strategy works for us. How could it work better for you?
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Comments (2)
Are you properly dressed.
Excuse me Madam. You cannot come to this TESCO store as you are not properly dressed.
How do you mean I am not dressed. Is there a new legislation.
No Madam, but we would like our customers to have a proper dress code, proper shoes and dress, but not nightdress.
I just wanted milk and butter.
Sorry Madam.
So shes goes to her local CTN store and Mr patel is quite happy to sell he milk and bread.
So the lesson is if you want to increase your sales, go easy on dress code.
By the way, in India it is quite commom for pepole to go in their pyjamas and vests but then it can get very hot there.
So would you allow your customers to come in shorts or even bikinis in a a sea side resort.
I am told that Tesco ran a commercial promoting their shops in which Martin Clunes visited the shop in his pjyamas, which adds to the enjoyment.
However, it would be interesting to hear if any newsagents do insist on a dress code?