Do you know who actually buys from you? I’m talking about the socioeconomic makeup of your best customers. Is it women 35 to 45 years old with an income of $60,000 that spend, on average, $200 on every purchase? Is it businesses with 10 employees or less? If you don’t know, it’s high time you found out. After all, you can’t clone your best customers until you know who they are.
Take the following steps to construct a model of your ideal customer:
1. Accumulate all the details of your sales for either the past six months or one year (it’s not necessary to exceed a year).
2. Add up the total gross income (GI) of each sale and divide that number by the total number of sales. This will give you your average ticket price. Example: 200 sales with total GI of $200,000 means your average ticket price is $1,000.
3. Take the top 10 percent of your invoices (based on sale price) and list all attributes you know about them. If you are targeting consumers, this should include gender, age, income, location and whether or not they have kids or own a home. If you are targeting businesses, this should include industry, number of employees, annual revenue and the title of the person at the company who worked with you.
Once you have the model of your ideal customer, you can begin to take steps to acquire more customers that are like them. If you don’t know some of the answers to the above, you can actually buy data and append it to your list.
I have found direct mail to be the most successful lead generation tool for my marketing, especially for acquiring specific customers. The reason is that you can get extremely specific with mailing lists and tailor your mail piece to that specific demographic for a higher response rate.
For example, at PostcardMania we mail to small business owners. We discovered from reviewing our invoices that dentists make up a whopping 20 percent of our revenue, so we pulled out all the data we could about our dental clients and by appending information, found that the bulk of them (not all of them) were the dentists with newer practices. So we targeted those newer practices and saw an increase in calls in, closes, and of course, overall revenue generated from that industry.
Say your target demographic, or ideal customer, is wealthy men in their 50s. You can simply get a mailing list of every man in your area whose age is between 50 and 59 with a household income of $300,000 or more. You could also further specify by home or car value, marital status, number of children and so on.
Not only does this list ensure you reach everyone in your potential ideal market, it also pulls great results. Since you know exactly who it is you are mailing to, you design a postcard (better than letters, no envelope to open) with copy and images sure to get their attention, rather than appealing to everyone. The more you hone in on the “button” that resonates with your audience, the higher your response rate (and conversion rate if your salespeople do their jobs) goes.
This is a simple strategy to target the customers you want to replicate by identifying your ideal customer, getting a mailing list of all the people that fit that model and mailing out marketing material that uses a message especially tailored message to them. For best results, continue to communicate this message over time. It takes an average of seven marketing touches for a prospect to respond to your message. So the more often they see it, the more likely they are to respond.
Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998 with a phone, computer and no capital investment. Since then, she has grown the company into one of the nation’s most effective direct mail marketing firms, specializing in postcard marketing for small to large-sized businesses. Over the years, she expanded to offer mailing list acquisition, website development, email marketing − all while continuing to educate clients with free marketing advice. She has been named Tampa Bay CEO of the Year, Business Woman of the Year in Tampa Bay and has been featured on MSNBC’s “Your Business.” PostcardMania is an Inc. 500 and 5000 company and has won awards for creativity, best business practices and leadership. Learn more at www.postcardmania.com.
