One of the few sustainable competitive advantages in a connected world is a genuine deep understanding of what makes each customer tick.
Alex Pratt, founder of direct-to-customer reading lamp seller Serious Brands, who is also the chairman of the CatEx Direct Commerce Association in the UK, admits that science is not always easy.
For example, someone is going to react differently on a tire website if they are broken down on the side of the road with a flat tire vs. if they are sitting at their desk and researching what set of new tires they want to buy.
But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test new and different ways of segmenting your lists to speak to what Pratt refers to as a “crowd of one.”
Even if it means testing a theory you, personally don’t believe in. And in Pratt’s case, that was Zodiac signs.
Can someone’s date of birth determine what sort of messaging they will respond to?
“If you read the signs of the Zodiac, you’re listening, in an absolute sense, and observing, and from the date of birth, you’re picking up their star sign and aligning the customer journey with that star sign, and then you see if it makes a difference or not,” said Pratt, who will be a keynote speaker at the NEMOA directXchange conference Sept. 14-16 in Schaumburg, IL.
Pratt said he’s found the exercise quite illuminating, even though he says he doesn’t particularly believe in the Zodiac calendar. But Serious Brands did find a 12% to 15% uplift by mirroring people according to their star sign.
”By testing things and trying to form a picture of someone, you can get to crowds of one,” Pratt said. “And you don’t really need that huge number of variables to really re-juice your segment down to one person.”
Tim Parry is Multichannel Merchant’s Managing Editor, and the lead programmer for Growing Global.