We All Know to Meet Our Customers Where They Are. Here's How to Do that Better.
When it comes to your ecommerce customers, we’ve considered WHO they are, WHAT they’re buying, and HOW MUCH they’re spending. There’s a lot to know, which leads to understanding your community in a more personal and specific way.
This week it’s time to get granular around WHERE your customers physically located.
Certainly you already have a general sense of their geography – by state, for example, and zip code – which naturally helps for segmenting the audience for targeted offerings and communications.
Let me also suggest a range of other, more nuanced instances for creatively incorporating WHERE your people are located into sales opportunities.
We would like to take our tasting room “on the road,” virtually for now and eventually in person again. Which states and metro areas should we target first? Where should we direct our efforts now in order to cultivate more loyal, longer-term customers?
Let’s say your winemaker has a connection to Seattle, or is planning a market visit there in 2021 and you’d like to develop an event. Who should I invite? And where is the most central location to organize a tasting, based on my customers’ physical locations? Maybe you’ll see that there’s a cluster of high-value customers within a 20-mile radius of each other, and within their geography is a retailer that you’ve been wanting to get to know better.
Where is my wallet share the greatest? And where is it potentially bigger? To understand that, we can look at locations where Average Customer Value is highest or growing, and where the Refund Ratio is already low.
Once you start looking at heatmaps and other visualizations of the WHERE of your customers, you start to see patterns that can inspire more intuitive ideas for communicating with your direct customer base.
Check out this week’s lookbook for some suggestions:
Heatmaps showing clusters of your customers nationally relative to a target geographical area like the northeast corridor
A state-by-state breakdown of net sales this year compared to last year
What jumps out at you, in terms of visualizing and understanding WHERE your customers are located? Can you see some possibilities?
I hope so, and I hope you’ll reach out for more information on this and the Virtual Analyst feature we announced last week. It’s exciting, effective strategy, and we’d love to put it into your hands.
As always, thank you for reading.