It’s the concept of taking action with a stream of marketing activities designed to capitalize on a positive customer action.
Here’s some actual data. The table in this post is for one-time buyers. The rows represent months since last purchase, the two columns show the probability of a customer purchasing in the next month given recency status and whether the customer visited the website in the past month. Take a look at the table.
Some of you have classic direct marketing training, and you are very familiar with RFM (recency / frequency / monetary) segmentation. You know that a customer who bought two months ago is a great customer, regardless of purchase frequency.
However … look at the table.
A customer who purchased two months ago and did not visit the website last month had a 3.7% chance of buying again in the next month. Now look at a customer with recency of 13-15 months ago, but the customer did visit the website in the past month. This customer has a 7.3% chance of buying again next month. With identical purchase frequency, the 13-15 month buyer (with a website visit in the past month) is 2x as likely to buy as a customer with recency = 2 months and no website visit in the past month.
I’ve been hard on the concept of “engagement” in my career – mostly because mutton-headed marketers will do anything to pursue engagement at the expense of protecting a healthy customer base.
But here’s a really good example of keeping a customer interested between purchases. If you do that, and do it the right way, your customer is much more likely to purchase.
This is where Action Streams come into play. If you are an email marketer, work with your email service provider to take action when a customer visits your website. Execute “streams” that encourage the customer to purchase. If you love offering discounts, here’s where you do it. If you know what the customer looked at, email the customer with similar merchandise. Set up a stream with five unique emails tailored to this individual customer … discounts (if that is your thing), content, new items from the same merchandise category, similar items to what the customer looked at previously, similar items to what the customer purchased previously.
The key is an Action Stream that is different (personalized) from the batch-and-blast email campaigns you’d normally send. You already send cart abandonment emails … this is extending the cart abandonment concept to a different level.
Does the concept of Action Streams make sense? The data suggests it is more than worth doing … anybody who visited your website in the past month is more responsive in the next month than many of your recent customers.
Do something with that information!!
Questions? (Kevin can be reached at minethatdata.com )
Thanks,
Kevin