The essential component of any e-commerce business is the customer. The primary goal of a business’s accompanying marketing strategy is to consistently acquire new customers and engage returning customers. A viable strategy in the early days of the internet and search marketing was to cast a wide net to cheaply and quickly reach new customers. Nowadays, we know that over 70% of customers currently buy just once from a website and don’t return. The blind pursuit to acquire any and every customer is doing brands more harm than good.
In today’s hyper-competitive landscape and overwhelming options, brands need to be more selective about attracting and engaging the right customers. The right customer is someone who will return to and recommend your brand again and again. The right customer spends a lot with your brand frequently and is a brand loyalist and evangelist; brands should know this brand loyalist’s interests, online shopping habits, and preferences well to consistently provide them an experience they expect. This right customer is what we call a high-value customer, whose continual engagement leads to a higher lifetime value per customer.
Identifying and understanding the right high-value customers for your brand will help you to sustainably and predictably grow your business.
What Is a High-Value Customer?
A high-value customer spends 3-5X more than average customers and is a crucial brand loyalist. High-value customers make shopping from your brand part of their routine and are more likely to be brand evangelists. They purchase large orders from your brand more frequently.
Customer segmentation is important, as each customer has their own unique habits and behaviors. By exclusively tracking the channels, items, and habits of your high-value customers, you’ll be able to build a profile that is as unique as they are. Brands can better realize the role they can play in a customer’s day-to-day life by understanding the circumstances surrounding the customer’s journey and the choices they make online. With an extensive high-value customer profile, you’ll be able to learn the strategies that can attract and engage more high-value customers, rather than just average customers.
Meaningful customer engagement and retention relies on responsible marketing. By marketing to and for your high-value customers, you can recruit more brand loyalists. You’ll change your marketing strategy to target friends, not strangers.
Why You Should Market To Your High-Value Customers
The fundamental flaw of modern digital marketing is being comfortable attracting only average customers. But the average customer does not exist; they’re a mathematical impossibility. Say you have three customers purchase from you in one session; one spends $200, the second $20, and the third $75. The AOV is $97. So you create a marketing campaign around the average $97; but because no customer actually spent $97, you’re effectively marketing to a nonexistent target.
If you create a profile, however, around the $200 shopper, then you’re marketing around someone real. You create a journey map around this high-value customer and learn more about their interest, behaviors, and expectations. Now, you create a marketing campaign that meets this customer at the touchpoints they frequent most, with products that address their specific needs at a time they’re most likely to be searching and shopping online. Suddenly, your marketing campaigns are more effective and responsible. Your campaigns are now targeted for customers who are similar to your $200 shopper and thus more likely to purchase from you.
You continually refine your high-value customer profile to engage and nurture brand loyalists to achieve above average growth.
Say No To Average With LXRInsights
LXRInsights is our customer analytics tool that helps you identify and engage your high-value customers. The idea for the tool started with a basic observation that a small percentage of customers drove a higher percentage of revenue share. We noticed that four to ten percent of customers were driving over 40% of revenue.
From that observation, we cemented a directive: if we can help brands identify those high-value customers early and engage and win them, then each marketing dollar spent would generate 3-5X more ROI.
At NetElixir, our priority is humanizing every click. By creating personas around your high-value customers, showing their product preference, frequency of purchase, and more key indicators, we can better understand who they are. Customer journeys are crucial to a brand’s marketing strategy. High-value customers have their own unique paths that lead them to your brand. Marketing strategies should take each unique journey into consideration to ensure the right messaging at the right touchpoint. Using LXRInsights, we can track the holistic customer journey, from first website visit to final purchase. With a complete understanding of their journey, you can learn which channels, products, messaging, and more are most effective at converting high-value customers and continually optimize your strategy to win more like them.
LXRInsights relies exclusively on first-party data, as you know your customers better than anyone else. Customers who share their first-party data are more likely to have a deeper connection with a brand and a desire to want to buy from them again, given the right time and products.
Join the world of responsible marketing by understanding your customers’ unique journeys and making every brand dollar go further. Schedule a demo of LXRInsights to learn more about your high-value customers.
Meet your industry’s high-value customer with our latest customer insights report, FACES!
Further Reading
- Understanding Your Customer’s Lifetime Value
- Insights Into the DTC Explosion
- Repeat Customer Prediction of New E-Commerce Customers
- Online Shopping Behavior of Gifting Industry High-Value Customers
