While every customer is important, especially to a small business, some are more important than others. For a moment, let’s look at customers at an automobile service department.
Within this group of customers, you will find segments that vary from highly loyal to those that visit out of necessity. Some may feel that spending money and offering rewards to those highly loyal would present the best option, since after all, they spend a lot of money at your business. Maybe one should spend the money on those customers that visit purely out of necessity? That’s not likely to be a positive move either since this segment will visit our service department eventually. It’s those customers that are in the middle segment that are worth going after. Since they are most likely to visit your competition, the greatest ROI can be found here. It’s important to offer the correct promotion at the right time for each customer.
The mix of promotions is a well-balanced act that should be constantly refined. Being to aggressive will cause customer defections and not being aggressive enough will allow the customer to think of others before considering your business. It’s not likely that those customers visiting your service department every month have a high level of satisfaction, nor does one desire to have that customer that only visits out of necessity.
Engagement with customers in a timely fashion will greatly increase the odds of not only retaining those in the middle-segment but will also assist with moving some of those once-a-year customers into a more desirable position.
