My target customer does not exist!

One of my last posts was about finding your ecommerce customer avatar ( here – https://www.smartebusiness.co.uk//?p=108), ie your exact target customer so that you can really optimise your ecommerce site copy and products for that person.  However since following the method I outlined I found that some of my target customers that data was giving me could not possibly exist.

Let me explain

One sites data showed that the most common job of the buyers was ‘student’ and yet the most popular work hours answer was ‘working full time’.  hmmm

Also there were other answers that contradicted each other.  So is my data rubbish?

No I do not think so, I think I have fallen in to the trap of looking for the ‘one best’ customer.  I remembered the talk by Malcom Gladwell on Spagetti Sauce and how for years companies had been doing market research wrong. (You can see his talk here http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html).  Prego is the case study used and this company tended to ask a group of consumers ‘which of these spaghetti sauces do you prefer?’ and then averaged the results, trying to find the ‘best’ sauce.  This was until Howard Moskowitz came along and said, no, different people have different tastes, and we should have several different kinds of spaghetti sauce to account for that. This sounds quite obvious now and has proven to be very sucessful in the market place and Prego has 19 different varieties of spaghetti sauce instead of just one.

So I think that looking at the data of my customers some of them are servicing two or even three distinct customer types.  One clothes retailer is selling to students under 20 who earn under 20k per year and married women at about 36 years old who earn 35k per year.  If you have enough data you can then filter by age and find out more about each types of target customer that you have.  For example the married women above likes to read the times and shops online three times a year etc…

Why is this necessary.

Well if you want to target customers on facebook or use an ad network like Trade Doubler you need to really understand you customer so you can find them.  Also when they see your ecommerce site you can tailor your landing page to suit.  For an example I know that one target customer predominantly buys clothes for ‘going out’ and my landing pages can reflect this and really push this.  I can even have a ‘going out offer’.  Marketing just becomes so much easier when you know who your customers are and why they are buying.

Also you can then segment your email list easily on one key defining feature that splits the customer groups.  Once you know that your customers fit into two or three groups then you can see clearly what specific atributes split them up.  This could be age, sex or work status, then you only have to ask them one key question to sucessfully segment them rather than asking everyone many questions that will put them off.

I think this is exciting stuff don’t you?