A Marketing Strategies Plan For Promotion, Advertising That Work in 2018

A Marketing Promotion Plan That Works:

When you base your company's marketing promotion plan on the results of database quintile scoring, you'll automatically align your marketing program to the most responsive customers.

A customer in quintile 5 is much more valuable to your business than a customer in quintile 1. In fact, on average, customers with RF scores of '55' are 360 times more responsive to promotions than customers with RF scores of '11.'

In previous articles, we've talked about marketing to your customer types, but how about marketing to your quintiles?

The Three Customer Buckets:

As it turns out, basing your marketing promotion plan on database quintile scoring will tell you exactly how to market to your customers. Let's define three broad buckets of customers.

1. Gold Customers: Quintile 5; represents the top 20% of your customers

2. Potential Gold Customers: Quintiles 4 through 2; represents the middle 60% of your customers

3. Big Losers: Quintile 1; represents the bottom 20% of your customers

Marketing to Your Gold Customers:

Many small business owners assume it's the Gold customers that should get all their expensive marketing promotions and discount incentives to keep them buying.

Budgeting the majority of your marketing promotion plan on Gold customers is a mistake. Why? Because they are already behaving like you want them to. They are already your best customers. In addition, because they are recent and frequent customers, many may be temporarily maxed out on your products or services. Giving them steep discount incentives just doesn't make sense.

The very fact that they are in the Gold bucket means that you have built up their trust and confidence. They know your products and services are top notch and are willing to pay full price for them. Don't give out discounts if you don't have to!

So what exactly are you supposed to do with your Gold customers? Simple. You find low-cost ways to retain them and you ask them for referrals. Your marketing efforts should concentrate on keeping these folks happy. A happy Gold customer will typically remain a Gold customer, and in the process, send high-quality referrals your way.

Here's a list of things you can do to help increase the retention of your Gold customers.

1. Send them a hand-written Thank-You card
2. Send them free industry reports and white papers
3. Send them useful services - for example, write my essay services or or any other services (for example, if you’re essay writing service)
4. Send them interesting news items and stories related to their business
5. Send them free surveys about their customer market
6. Send them a Starbucks or Amazon gift card
7. Give them increased customer service and technical support
8. Send them a gift during a non-holiday time
9. Send them a framed certificate of appreciation

Your gold customers will typically represent 80% of your revenue. Stop the discounting and refocus your marketing promotion plan on retention.

Plan on contacting your Gold customers at least six times a year. This may seem like a lot, but a "contact" can be an email, phone call, direct mail, Thank-You card or survey. If you publish a monthly electronic newsletter, then Gold customers that have signed up for it are already getting 12 communications a year!

With your Gold customers, a 5% increase in retention can translate to a 25%-125% increase in profits!

Marketing to Your Potential Gold Customers:

Your marketing dollars should be concentrated on your potential Gold customers. These are customers that fall within quintiles 4, 3 and 2.

Through effective marketing, you work to turn these folks into Gold customers, thereby increasing their value.

Your efforts to this group will involve building trust, credibility and a desire for your products and services. Here are some ideas for marketing to your potential Gold customers.

1. Membership or Frequent Buyers Program
2. Discount incentives (be careful here: once you discount to a customer, you may have to continue discounting to retain their business.)
3. Upselling and cross-selling of products and services
4. Free extended warranties with purchase
5. Buy a product and get a free accessory item

Plan on communicating to your potential Gold customers at least six to eight times a year through newsletters, direct mail and, if possible, face-to-face communications.

Marketing to the Big Losers

Quintile 1 represents the bottom 20% of your customers. They will typically bring in only 5% or less of your overall revenue. In some cases, these customers may actually be unprofitable if you are spending money each year mailing to them.

How should you design your marketing promotion plan around the Big Losers? Find ways to reactivate them or send them off to your competitor to deal with.

While it certainly is worth trying to increase the purchase power of this group, I don't recommend spending a lot of money and time trying to do so. Your marketing dollars are much better spent in your middle quintiles.

If you have the budget, I do recommend trying to send a "customer reactivation packet" with strong incentives for coming back and trying your products and services. This is the only group where steep discounting may work as a reactivation tool.

If you can't get a response from this group, you can either remove them from your mailing list or simply ignore them. My recommendation is to prune poor performing customers from your database once a year. You're much better off spending your resources on marketing to your middle quintiles and retaining your Gold customers.

---

Take the time to base your marketing promotion plan on quintile scoring. You'll save money and increase your business profits. It's simply good database marketing!