Don’t segment your customers by whether they buy or not

I read an article the other day on best practices for emailing customers of wine and spirits producers. In it, I found this bit of advice, 

“Within your CRM, you can segment your audience by lifetime value, club members, loyal or churned customers, subscribers who haven’t made an initial purchase, or customers who haven’t purchased recently, and so-on.”

That would be a best practice if we were talking in 2010 but today, it’s not enough. Take “churned customers” or “customers who haven’t purchased” for example. Why aren’t they buying? Why did they leave? You don’t know? Sending them an email of why you think they’re not interested is either making a great offer to the wrong audience or bad messaging to the right one. At best, it’s hit or miss and frankly, you can do a lot better.

Segmentations and sales emails will do better if you know the following (and you can insert any product for wine):

• Where do they buy their wine?
• Who or what influences them to try new wines?
• What information about buying wine would really make a difference?
• What frustrates them about buying wine?

There’s more but I’ll stop with frustrations. A frustration is basically an unmet need and if you can understand customers’ frustrations, you’ll know what their needs are and you can market to that. Emotions, not memberships or lifetime purchases, are triggers to buying. The problem with virtually every CRM or email marketing program is that they’re not built to append meaningful emotions to customer files or segment them that way. The result is that they treat customers like bits of data, which not only results in poor performance but can even turn some customers away.

We’ve been trained to think of customers as email addresses by all the CRMs and email marketers.

Another problem is that we’ve been trained to think of customers as email addresses by all the CRMs and email marketers. That puts a premium on acquiring more emails rather than on building relationships. The key is to think about customer service and how you treat people when they enter your digital space. That can’t be done without tools that enable you to ask questions of your customers and respond to them based on what they’ve told you.

Can you imagine any customer that would walk into a store and say, “My lifetime value to you is $1,000 and my last purchase was three months ago.” What could that possibly tell you about the needs of that customer? But you certainly know how to deal with a customer who tells you, “Buying wine frustrates me because I have no idea of the taste before I buy. If only I had some guidelines, it would be more meaningful.” You’d know instantly how to talk to that customer and it’s likely you’d make a sale and gain their loyalty. Digital marketing should be no different. You just need the right tools that enable you to have that conversation. 

People don’t buy because of good emails.

Four years ago, we began to build a platform that would enable you to do just that. We’re about to release our third version and we’re getting better than ever in enabling conversations between you and thousands of customers that make your selling more effective for you and more satisfying to them. 

You may have heard the adage, “People don’t buy drills. They buy the ability to make holes.” This is no different. People don’t buy because of good emails. They buy because they like their relationship with the company they’re buying from. Emails are a messaging conveyance, not hole makers or relationship builders unless the message is what they want to hear.

Interested in learning more? Let’s set up a demo of how Oomiji can help you understand your customers needs.