Thinking about how your customers engage with your business

In my business we have strategies to acquire and keep customers, as proposed by Peter Drucker.

We have a group of customers that we believe are fans who tell other customers about the things that we do well and who give us great feedback. We have many loyal customers who buy our weekly magazine, respond to our advertisers announcements and to our campaigns, and who use our products and services to promote what they do. And we have targets, potential customers who we think will benefit from using our products but who currently do not.

Using this simple segmentation model, we organise ourselves so that we deliver better content, so that we understand who we are writing for, and we plan marketing to explain the benefits that our products provide. We invest time in researching what our readers say they want (attitude) and what information and news they actually use (behaviour) and we design our products to maximise the benefit to them.

This may be a model that shop owners could use for their own businesses by segmenting your shoppers into two groups and then thinking about ways to convert passers-by and other local people into shoppers.

In the early 1990s one supermarket group carried out a similar exercise when it was considering shutting down a store in central London. What it found out was that people who used its shop wanted to buy things for their lunch, top up shopping, and there were enough of them to build a good business – perhaps the start of the convenience revolution.

Putting customers at the centre of our strategy works for us. How could it work better for you?