How Can You Tell If A Customer Is Still A Customer Or Not?

Yesterday my group coaching call centered on customer lifecycles and how to use customer behavior metrics such as latency, frequency, recency, and monetary value to conduct predictive modeling.

The concept here is that the best way to predict a customer’s future behavior is by their current behavior, especially when their behavior can be compared to the aggregate former customer so you can take preventive action and bring them back into your business.

On the flip side, you can also know in advance when a customer is displaying hyper-responsive tendencies so you can make sure that you put offers in front of this customer fast enough so they don’t go somewhere else to quench their thirst for whatever it is you’re selling.

But the question in the title to this entry is an important one, yet sadly, it’s a question 99% of small business owners never even consider.

To make matters worse most small business owners don’t really understand that their customer list is perishable and that without putting future offers in front of their customer lists they become an accomplice in degrading their business’s #1 asset.

If you’ve never considered the above question then you are currently practicing “The Ostrich Theory of Customer Marketing.”

This is where you operate under the false assumption that your customers are customers for life – unless they specifically tell you they are no longer interested in buying from you.

Just to be clear… Every person who ever bought from you is not the definition of a customer.

So, take a look inside your business and get come clarity about your customer life cycle. Then take it even further and define the latencies between each desired customer action.

Lastly, from now on when customers deviate from the customer life cycle don’t stick your head in the sand; create an irrefutable offer that lures the customer back.