Profiling of your customer base and extraction of lists for a mailing based on a profile is one of the key marketing activities for a mail order company.
For many years, the Commerce Manager has had the ability to extract lists based on one or more of the following criteria:
- Keyword(s) on contact
- Order / invoice number
- Purchase history by date, value and category of goods purchased
- Country
- Town
- County
- Organisation
- Partial address / partial postcode
- Type and sub-type of contact
- Language
- Source Code
- Age of contact in database
- Contact’s position
- Plus custom configured criteria
- Plus others
The latest feature – binary scoring – allows you to grade customers from 1 to15 by the regularity of their purchasing habits weighted in favour of the most recent purchasers. This grading can be used in conjunction with the above bulleted criteria for a highly targeted mailing list.
This feature is of particular interest to companies that wish to target regular or repeat customers. For example companies that sells health products or clothing.
Four time periods are entered (for example: four quarters of the year) to define the regularity and the system will grade each contact based on how often they purchase.
Taking the example of four quarters, someone who purchased in quarter 1 but did not purchase again would be graded as “1”. While a customer who purchased in all four quarters would be graded as “15”.
You can then extract contacts based on their grades. Typically, you would extract customers with a grading of greater than “12” and mail them with a Thank You letter or an offer to join your club to ensure loyalty. While you may mail out those that are graded “4” or less with a special offer to capture their custom again.
You can define as many time periods as you require and generate scores as many times as you need.