How to Identify & Create More Great Customers

A version of this post was originally published on MarketingProfs.com.

Every company wants more customers. But even more than that, you want great customers. You want customers who are loyal and spend a lot with you. It’s the old 80-20 rule, where 20% of your customers are likely generating 80% of your revenue. Ideally, you’d like to grow that 20%, because increasing it even a little has a huge effect on your business.

Most brands start by asking themselves…

Who Is My Ideal Customer?

They generally answer this question by looking at who their best customers are today. B2C brands might examine:

• How often do they purchase? And what’s the annual value of their purchases?
• How often do they engage with our website, mobile app, and other channels?
• Do they submit positive reviews?
• Are they an email, SMS, or push subscriber; a loyalty member; or private label credit cardholder?
• Do they live in certain places?
• Are they an influencer or evangelist for my brand?
• Plus, a bunch of other psychographic, geographic, and behavior questions.

And B2B brands might examine:

• What industry are they in? And is their sub-industry meaningful?
• What size company are they?
• How many employees do they have?
• How old is the company?
• Where are they physically located? And where do they do business?
• What do they look like operationally? What does their tech stack look like?
• Plus, a bunch of other firmographic, geographic, and technographic questions, many of which are more pointedly connected to what their company offers.

This kind of persona analysis can make sales and marketing efforts much more effective by narrowing down the field of candidates who are worth extra attention from your brand, as well as helping with advertising decisions. But identifying your ideal customer is different from creating a great customer. That latter requires a different kind of analysis.

What Makes a Great Customer?

Instead of looking at firmographic, geographic, and technographic characteristics, now we want to look at behaviors. Specifically, what do our best customers do that our less valuable ones don’t?

For B2C brands, are your best customers significantly more likely to:

• Follow up a purchase by buying accessories or related products or services?
• Make their second purchase within 90 days?
• Purchase across multiple product categories?
• Download your mobile app within 60 days?
• Opt in to receive promotional emails, text, or push messages?
• Apply for financing or for your private label credit card?

Additionally, for B2B brands, are your best customers significantly more likely to:

• Use all their purchased user seats or licenses within 60 days?
• Complete their first project using your solution within 30 days? 14 days?
• Attend your user conference within a year of becoming a customer?
• Attend 3 or more webinars during their first year as a customer?
• Become active in your user community during their first 6 months?
• Use certain product features during their first 6 months?
• Open a line of credit or use other financial services?
• Contract with your professional services team?
• Provide a testimonial or become a referenceable customer during their second year? 

Dig into the histories of your customers and determine which behaviors predict higher spends, higher satisfaction, and greater loyalty. This analysis doesn’t have to be exhaustive. Just look for patterns and correlations, and apply some common sense.

That’s because the next step is to see all of those correlations as opportunities to give your customers a nudge to take those actions. That nudge can be in the form of emails, texts, push messages, in-app prompts, or calls or meetings over the appropriate period of time.

Operationalize a set of interventions to encourage these desired behaviors, keeping careful track of the interventions and their performance, keeping in mind that early messaging will likely make customers more likely to respond to later messaging. Over time, refine your messaging, optimize the number of touches, and finetune the timing of those touches based on how your customers are responding and whether those behaviors are indeed making them better customers.

For help building your audience, improving your targeting, using automation, and more, get our Marketing Checklists via a free, no-form download.

But don’t stop there. Also tackle this issue from the other end of the spectrum by asking yourself…

What Causes a Dissatisfied Customer?

Obviously, a dissatisfied customer can’t be a great customer. So, it’s wise when building programs to nurture customers to also build ones that reduce dissatisfaction.

In some cases, dissatisfaction can grow out of not doing some of the things that great customers do. For instance, if a great customer tends to use all their purchased user seats or licenses within 60 days, you might see that a future dissatisfied customer uses fewer than half of theirs during that time frame.

For B2C brands, behaviors that might predict or indicate dissatisfaction might include:

• Becoming inactive or unsubscribing from promotional emails, texts, and push messages
• No longer visiting your website or using your mobile app
• Returning an excessive amount of products
• Submitting negative reviews

Additionally, for B2B brands, such behaviors might include:

• Reaching out to customer support numerous times
• Using your solution to start, but not complete multiple projects
• Reducing the number of user seats or licenses
• Demoing, but not purchasing additional products
• Reducing or eliminating their use of professional services

Again, do some exploring by looking at customers you’ve lost and their behaviors in the months or year before they moved on. The behaviors you find should all be considered potential triggers for interventions, whether that’s messaging, time and attention, or something else.

How to manage long-term inactive subscribers and never-actives.

Create Better Customers

Sometimes great customers just happen—in the same way that sometimes dissatisfied customers just happen. Tilt fortune in your favor by identifying and building triggered and escalation programs around customer behaviors that strongly correlate to the future outcomes you want.

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