When you are getting an idea of who your customers are and their buying trends there are a few ways that you can do this. Retail customer segmentation is one of these ways. This allows you to manage and organize your customer data. Segmentation is important for accurately and effectively targeting your direct marketing efforts.
Increasing Your Exposure
Once you perform this type of analysis you will be able to see the demographics of your most loyal customers. Now, say your customer base is mostly men between 40 and 49 years of age then you do not need to target this demographic so much to increase your sales. Of course, you will do whatever is necessary to keep this demographic happy, but you want to target those outside of this demographic. Say that you have a hardware store. Men will naturally be more common customers, but this does not mean that you cannot target women too. Create things to market what you have for things like gardening and home improvement. Many women do their own smaller home improvements and their own gardening so target them. You also want to target younger men because they surely could use items from a hardware store from time to time.
You Will Gain Leverage
Once you get to know your customers better you will have more leverage in creating sales and promotions to keep them happy. For example, if your 40 to 49 year old men mostly buy tools and items to get things done around the house then you can create sales and promotions around these types of items. You can also order more items that fall into the home improvement category so that they will be able to get more items from you when they need to get some work done around the house. For example, if you tend to have smaller items consider getting some larger items too like roof shingles, items to make HVAC repairs and items that can be rented like power washers and carpet shampoo machines.
Keep Track of Your Efforts
After you make some changes based on this type of analysis pay attention to the results. For example, if you start to stock some bigger home improvement items, keep track of the demographics of the customers who buy them as well as how well they sell. The same goes for your hypothetical marketing campaign to bring in more women customers.
