Lots of talk about the long tail. In The Long Tail and The Dip, Seth Godin says it’s an important breakthrough in marketing thought. The Ad Contrarian thinks it’s The Long Tail of Baloney. I’ve been thinking a lot about customer relationship marketing – and think it’s the other long tail.
Consider how customers are involved in your product. As their need increases so does their interest. At purchase, interest peaks, but it doesn’t fall immediately. If you were to graph your customers’ interest, post purchase, it would look a lot like the graphs often used to describe the Long Tail.
This is a big opportunity. Direct marketers know about the opportunity. A direct marketer will tell you,
“the most important sales isn’t the first sale, it’s the second.”
It’s an opportunity, often lost to mass marketers because they aren’t paying attention, to increase the value of your customers and lower the cost to market to them.
Calculators out, there’s math coming. Which scenario is better: send 100K customer emails, selling the same thing to everyone, and get a 1% response, or send 10K emails, with content specifically designed for the customer segment, and get a 15% response? In the first you made 1,000 sales and, at best, missed an opportunity to add value to the relationship. In fact, you probably annoyed 99K customers. In the second you made 1,500 sales and didn’t annoy anyone.
Hip Shots
- Use the Other Long Tail. Begin the connection process with customers immediately after purchase: acknowledge that they’re important and that you value their business, reinforce the purchase decision and assure them that they have made a good decision.
- Understand your worth to them and their worth to you. All customers are not created equal. This is OK. A low value customer is probably not that engaged in the category so, in all likelihood, you aren’t that important to them either. Don’t waste your money and their time trying to make something out of nothing. Good customers are another tale. They are very important to you and you are probably important to them.
- Good customers expect to be rewarded. And this doesn’t mean you have to bribe them. A well targeted discount is always appreciated but they will probably buy from you regardless. Your product is important to them. There are lots of other ways to reward good customers.
- Ensure your content is relevant to your best customers. Take the time and invest the money to understand your best customers’ needs. Focus your sales message on their specific needs. Content is king. If the content (sales message) is relevant it will be welcomed and acted upon.
Follow me on Twitter
