#29 Whales, VIP and Taking Care of Your Best Customers

 

Everyone in this episode of the Effective Ecommerce podcast we’re gonna be talking about whales VIP customers very important person customers and taking care of your best customers in general and there’s a very specific reason why we’re talking about this and this is because these are the customers that are giving you the most money you want to keep them happy you want to keep them coming back to you as long as possible and honestly spending as much money with you as possible. So hopefully by this point in the podcast I’m hoping you have some sales and even if you don’t have any sales these are some good ideas to have some good systems to put in place early in your business and we’ll talk about specifically what the systems are to get more of your big customers more of those whales coming back to you and in general how to get people to spend more money we’re gonna talk about all these different systems.

So if you don’t already have a lot of sales that’s fine listen to this episode you know get ideas for when you do become a bigger company if you’re a bigger company you have a decent amount of sales this is a perfect episode for you. So in general with business there are three main ways to make more money get more customers to get more money per sale and then increase the lifetime value or get more sales out of that customer. So it’s how many customers you have how big is the sale that they make and how many sale or purchases do they make with you that’s really it and now we can dive in a little bit deeper there’s more to it than just that how do you get more customers well you either need to get more traffic or a better conversion rate for the most part there’s like the two main things of getting more customers when it comes to online I mean really when it comes to anything but specifically with online getting more money per sale how do you do that you can do number of different ways you can upsell them you can give them incentives to buy higher quantities you can sell related products you can do all kinds of different things and then last but not least how do you increase the lifetime value well I mean really I guess that kind of ties in the last thing we said but it’s either increasing the amount of money they spend per sale or increasing how many sales that they have.

Those are really the tools at your just and for a lot of people out there they probably already know about the 80/20 rule also known the known as the Pareto principle but this is very important because a number of different reasons and this applies all over life but especially you’ll see this in business. So for those of those of you that don’t know what the 80/20 rule is let me explain it really quick and then you’ll see very quickly how it relates to business.

So the 80/20 rule is within any given system about % of the or % of the results are produced by % of inputs. So this was originally founded for wealth if you look at wealth distribution. So if you look at a group of people especially a bigger group of people like the United States let’s say % of the people the top % control % of the wealth and it might even be more skewed than that but the idea is that it’s it’s skewed your numbers. So you the way that you would apply this in business is maybe % of your traffic comes from a certain source but that % of the traffic produces % of your sales. So maybe you do SEO you do Pinterest ads you do Facebook ads and only % of your traffic comes from Facebook ads but that % is % of your sales well what does that tell you it tells you you need to figure out what you’re doing well with Facebook ads and do it either on Pintrest ads or that you need to be running more Facebook ads and that’s a very important thing to note another thing I want to talk about is whales. So if you look at casinos that’s where the term originally came from a whale is someone that’s gonna spend a lot of money at a casino casino spend a lot of money on them to get them coming back over and over again they’ll buy on private flights they’ll put them up for free in the hotel rooms you’ve probably heard stories about this all the time and they know that somewhere around percent of their money that they make from gambling comes from these whales. So they treat them really well they get them to come back again and again and again to their casino it’s basically what you want to do with your business this is what you want to do anytime you see certain customers that are spending a lot of money with you you want first off identify them and try to get them to come back again and again but to try to see what those different customers have in common. So throughout this whole podcast I’ll give a few different examples but let’s use B dancewear for instance. So it’s a dance clothing company and we look at our sales and I don’t remember the exact number of top my head but like somewhere between to % of our revenue comes from large orders people purchasing more than $ worth of stuff and. So what are those people doing well they’re dance studios or there’s some kind of a high school dance team or there’s some kind of a team. So what this triggered in my head is okay it’s much easier to get a dance team as a customer let me put it this way it’s about as much work to get a dance team as a customer as it is to get an individual as a customer no matter what you have to convince one person to buy from you but if I have to only convince one person I’d rather try to convince dance studio owners or dance teachers to buy from me then I would try to waste my time on getting individuals to buy for me it’s just the amount of money I can make is. So much more for the dance studios. So what I did is I looked at the data and I said okay Oh most of our revenues coming from these these people well how do we incentivize them maybe we offer things like free shipping over a certain amount maybe we offer discounts over a certain amount maybe we redirect our marketing towards those people and. So that’s really what it is is it’s looking at the data now for performance nut butter it’s totally different most people only buy one or two boxes we get much less there’s not as many large orders with that company. So what I do is I try to figure out okay well who are the large orders and it turns out it’s people that are maybe giving them away for a thing that they’re hosting or you know there’s a bunch of different things out there reasons why they might be producing it and why they might be buying in large quantities and I still don’t have enough data with that company to fully know who I can reliably target to get larger order order quantities and the other thing about this is you might look at behaviors you might look at demographics maybe I realized that people to are three times more likely to purchase a large order and I note that little thing in my head and I say next time I’m running a Facebook ad maybe I target those demographics or a bunch of different options right there. So that’s one thing to note the next thing to note is what’s the buying cycle because when someone’s bought from you they the hope is that they’ll buy from you again. So for B dancewear it’s about every three months every three months or. So if someone needs a new costume and I know this and I lock this knowledge away and I realize I got to reach out to them after three months after their previous order I got to reach out to them and I haven’t implemented this I did this for a while but I haven’t but after six months if they still haven’t ordered from me that means that they probably went to someone else for their last order that means that I need to try to incentivize them to come back and maybe I offered them some discount codes maybe I just give them a call or I have someone on our team just give them a call the key here is figuring out what the buying cycle is how often they’re gonna be purchasing from you and trying to get them. So the next time that they’re ready to make an order that they remember about you and we do this in a number of different ways I’ll talk about this later in the podcast with B dance where we have a pretty good system that that’s worked well for us it can always work better. So performance nut butter is totally different the violent buying cycle for performance nut butter is probably once a month or. So and it could be sooner if people eat it really quickly there’s ten pouches that come in a box and it depends on how quickly you did that could be two weeks for some people that could be a month for other people but I know if after six weeks or. So someone hasn’t reordered it’s time for me to reach out and say hey you know either here’s a coupon code or just reach out and touch that and say hey it sounds like it seems like it’s time for your next order what did you think you know there’s the number of different ways to go about this but it’s keeping in mind what is that buying cycle and you can look at the data to see this you can look at your repeat customers and try to figure out on average how often do they make a repeat order and that’s and that’s very important there. So let’s take a look at how to treat our VIPs and how specifically I do it with B dancewear and there’s a number of different ways to do this what we do with B dancers anytime someone orders something over $ we log it in our book. So have an automated system that does this and we write away the next day we give them a call and just a touch base and say hey we saw that you placed an order we just want to talk you know how how soon until you need it just. So that they know that we’re going above and beyond our competitors the next thing we do is I believe we give them a call after they’ve received it after they’ve received it we give them a call just say hey how is everything we just want to make sure everything’s good if you need to return anything we’re trying to go above and beyond we’re trying to like let them know that then every time they order from us they’re gonna receive good service and that they should come back to us because if there’s an issue we’re gonna solve it then after that a month after they’ve received their order we send them a hand-written note saying thank you. So much for your order we try to make it as personalized as we can it’s not always easy to make it super personalized but that’s one of the important things and there’s a story I’m gonna butcher the story but it was of I think it was the Guinness Book of World Records greatest salesperson and what he did that was different than everyone else is he would write after someone purchased I think it was a car from him after they’d purchase a car from him about a year later or two years later or something like that he’d write them handwritten notes saying hey thanks. So much you know whatever whatever thing maybe make a comment about something that they had a conversation about and what would happen is people would come back to him to buy another car and. So he had automatic people coming back buying cars and there’s kind of this farmer vs. hunter mentality in online business some people have this hunter mentality where you always need to go out and get new customers and then after you get that customer go get another customer and that’s exhausting that’s very tiring it’s much easier to farm customers it’s much easier to get a customer one time and have them become a repeat customer have them tell their friends about it the experience and. So with be dancer that’s what we’re trying to do we’re trying to we know we’re gonna get new customer we know we’re gonna get new dance studio customers I have Adwords and product listing ads and all these different type of ABS in place to get new customers but once we get that person it’s expensive to get a new now client well once we get them we want to make sure we keep them. So our business continues to grow and grow and grow. So that’s I think that’s most of the topic I want to talk about here I think something else to keep in mind is anytime someone places a large order they could be the potential brand rep for you they are someone that’s going to be spreading your message about your company they probably have friends that are well-off or willing to spend money as well you want to make sure make sure you treat them well because they’re gonna go tell their friends how they were treated they’re gonna go talk about your company and you want to make sure you give them every opportunity to say something as nice as possible and that’s that’s hugely important the last little thing I want to leave you with is look at the data you can go into Google Analytics on my youtube channel I do have a walkthrough on Google Analytics to help you with this but you can look at the data and you can segment you can do all kinds of crazy things and you can see first off determine what your order your average order size is and then try to figure out what would you consider someone a VIP at what point would you bend over backwards for them and really try hard to make them a returning customer for us it was $ because anyone spending over $ is buying for a team buying for a studio buying they’re not just buying for themselves we’re not we’re not gonna bend over backwards for an individual at this stage just because it’s not profitable for us the other thing looking at the data is you want to look at the buying cycles how often is your average customer purchasing from you figure out that information and use that to your advantage by offering coupon codes offering discount sending emails to them all that kind of stuff right there. So that’s pretty much it for this episode I just want you guys to be aware of where where is most your revenue coming from how can you increase that revenue how can you get repeat customers to come back to you again and again and again think about that stuff and I’ll leave you guys pretty much with that obviously if you haven’t yet got the e-commerce success pack go to Effective Ecommerce com poke around you’ll you’ll find I think at the top there it says the free e-commerce success pack get that it comes to checklist for starting your business at a bunch of other great stuff don’t forget to leave a five star review on iTunes if you haven’t yet and if you in if you leave a five star review on iTunes I’ll interview in a chance to win a free consulting session with me I’ll help you I’ll go over your business with you all kinds of good stuff I really enjoy doing those. So that’s fun for me you know last but not least I don’t usually talk about that I’m not the this that much but if you haven’t yet go to Amazon look up performance nut butter if you really want to help me out look up the search term keto snack and if it’s something you’re interested in definitely don’t don’t do this just as a favor for me but by performance nut butter leave that five-star review that would be huge for me I don’t make too many asks but if you’ve been listening about my company for a while performance nut butter probably at least interested in trying it it would mean the world to me if you try it and leave that five-star review on Amazon or for any reason you don’t like it send me an email Travis that Effective Ecommerce calm let me know either way let me know what you think. So if you get the chance to go on Amazon and do that a huge thank you all if you’re on the YouTube video I’ll link it up right here but either way guys thanks. So much for listening this episode and have a great rest your day

 

 

  • Three ways to make more money
    • Get More Customers
      • Better Conversion Rate
      • More Traffic
    • More Money Persale
    • Lifetime Value
  • 80/20
  • Story of Casinos
  • How do you get more sales
  • Buying Cycle
    • B Dancewear
    • Performance Nut Butter
    • How to maximize them
  • How to Treat VIPs
    • B Dancewears System
  • Vip’s are brand reps
  • Look at the data
    • Determine what a VIP is for you
    • Look at the buying cycle