Category Archives: Driller Q & A

Customer Retention in a High Churn Business Model

Analytical Culture, Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Topic Overview

Hi again folks, Jim Novo here.

Yea, sometimes customer retention is a very tough gig; some businesses are simply not likely to encourage repeat purchase. But you can still try, right? Or perhaps focus your efforts on where the real power to affect customer value is for this type of business – acquisition and onboarding.

Let’s Drill Down …

Q:  I bought your book a few months ago and I thought it was great.

A:  Thanks for your support and kind words!

Q:  I did what I could using your book, but my mind is going in circles and I need help. Unfortunately I can’t pay big bucks and am hoping that the “case” will be of enough interest to allow you to help me out at less than you could charge to bigger companies.

A:  Perhaps! For example, I am always open to interesting projects if I can use them to publish a case study (names changed to protect the innocent)… most large companies do not want customer retention data revealed and it is tough to get case studies out there…

Q:  What I do: My company sells prepaid calling cards on the web.  I have been working at the company for 2 years and 4 months now.  Consumers purchase the service to place international calls at reduced rates from their landlines and cell phones.  They have no obligation to re-purchase.  They can buy any increment between $10 to $100 at a time. They can recharge their accounts at any time.

A:  Yes…

Q:  What I’ve found so far:

They seem fall into two main groups ­ those that buy only once, and those that buy more than once, but then each of these sub-groups has lots of sub-segments and it is confusing.  Some last a week, others last 2.4 years.

A:  This is typical…

Q:  My goals: 

Continue reading Customer Retention in a High Churn Business Model →

Second Purchase Marketing

Analytics Education, Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Digital Analytics, Driller Q & A, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, ,

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Topic Overview

Hi again folks, Jim Novo here.

HIgh end hardgoods. One of the most difficult retail categories to deal with from a customer retention perspective, both offline and online. Only vehicles are tougher. In some ways, the category can be easier online, but perhaps not for a single local store due to competition. So what’s the best way to attack the repeat purchase peoblem? Focus on where you have the highest likelihood of success – 2nd purchase Latency. Ready for the Drillin’?

Q:  I loved your book, thanks.  Armed with it, I feel like I can achieve much more than most small retailers in terms of CRM.

A:  Thanks for the kind words!

Q:  I have a question though.  I sell relatively high-priced furniture and design items, and as this is our first year of business, our inventory is pretty small.  As a result, my Frequency totals range from 1 to 4.  That’s it, after a year of business.  About 75% of our customers have bought once and it “ramps up” to 4 from there.  I use “ramp” in the broadest sense of the word.

A:  Yep.  That’s the hardgoods business, especially on the web.  Don’t beat yourself up, it’s early in your game with lines like these, and don’t blame it too much on inventory either.  In the long run, it’s better to sell the *right* stuff than everything you can find, trust me.

Q:  So when I compute RF quintiles, the totals don’t cleanly fit within quintiles.  In other words, for RF scores of X1 ­ X4, customers have purchased once.  X5 customers have purchased 2, 3, 4, or 5 times.  If I raise the hurdle and only look at customers who have purchased more than once, I still can’t fit them cleanly in five quintiles.

A:  That’s one problem with RFM, it’s a bit robotic and works best with larger (usually meaning older) databases…

Q:  I read your article on durable goods purchases and avoiding the one-time-buyer problem.  I guess I’m looking for advice on how to make the “F number” significant until we’ve been in business long enough to get a broader range of frequency options.

Continue reading Second Purchase Marketing →

Using RFM Scores to Predict Profits

Analytics Education, Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, ,

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Topic Overview

Hi again folks, Jim Novo here.

Subsidy costs. You’re just starting to hear people talk about these ideas in online marketing, but they’ve been around for years offline in direct marketing. The basic idea is this: sending a discount to someone who is very highly likely to make a purchase without the discount is a waste of margin dollars best spent elsewhere. And you can measure this effect quite easily using Control Groups, another concept starting to get some recognition with online marketers.

Discussing / implementing these topics can be a bit difficult, though the Finance people will get it immediately and love it if you go in this direction. A plus for fellow Drillers out there is you can start to see some of these ideas in action BEFORE you start going deep using the RFM & Lifecycle data we’ve been talking about and using for years.

Below is a great example using RFM data from a fellow Driller. You ready to go ?

Q:  Since our last conversation few months ago, we went ahead and tested 3 different promotions using the RFM model.  

The 1st promotion was the test for RFM method itself to see what patterns emerge for response rate, incremental sales, etc.  The next 2 promotions targeted the customers from RFM cells with the highest incremental lift from the 1st test promotion.  Here is what we saw.  Since the targeted audience were our loyalty card members, they transact and spend at a fairly high level (the data below is modified but the trend is maintained).  For the response rate, we saw a sawtooth pattern:

(Jim’s note: RFM is the 3 digit score, Rate is Response Rate.  More on RFM here and here.)

A: Yes…

Continue reading Using RFM Scores to Predict Profits →