Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

Customer Retention

You've heard me say this many times before ... Customer Retention is a function of your Merchandise Assortment.

This doesn't mean you cannot impact rebuy rates ... you can!

But you can only do so much.

In the early 90s at Lands' End we retained about 55% of prior year twelve-month buyers. That's a very high rate. We sold mens/womens casual, mens/womens tailored, kids, home merchandise.

In the late 90s at Eddie Bauer we retained about 45% of prior year twelve-month buyers, even though we had catalogs and e-commerce and stores. Our customers didn't really like us, even though we were a direct competitor to Lands' End.

In other words, similar companies had 45% - 55% rebuy rates. The difference was due to marketing effectiveness and customer trust.

In the first half of the 00s at Nordstrom we retained about 74% of prior year twelve-month buyers. Not only did our customers trust us, but with more skus than people living in Milwaukee we had a breadth of merchandise to allow customers to continually purchase all year long.

I have gift-centric clients with rebuy rates around, say, 20%. Those brands might be brilliant marketers, but with a limited assortment for nine months of the year rebuy rates will be suppressed.

Starbucks operates a whole 'nuther business model. When you sell a product that can be purchased daily (or more often), you'll retain even more customers on an annual basis ... maybe 90%. Thought Leaders will tell you to emulate what Starbucks does in an effort to create your own loyal customer base, but unless you sell an addictive product that can be purchased daily, nothing that Starbucks does applies to your business. Nothing.

If you sell products that are needed often (like Starbucks), your retention rates will be high.

If you sell products that are not needed often (i.e. a Lexus SUV), your retention rates are incredibly low.

Customer Retention is a function of what you sell. There is no right/wrong rebuy rate, given that rates are dependent on how often customers need what you sell and the depth of your merchandise assortment. Rates can vary based on marketing effectiveness ... +/- 5% off of a baseline is common ... if a company has a 30% rebuy rate, the good marketer will hit 35%, the bad marketer will hit 25%.

Unlocking Customer Value: Merchandise

Much of the "unlocking customer value" thesis surrounds customer service and discounts / promotions / loyalty programs.

The concept behind a marketplace or a mall is to aggregate all merchandise interests in one place, thereby capturing more customer spend.

Your business isn't fundamentally different. Smaller, sure. A much more limited assortment? Yes. But the concepts are similar. Zappos sells socks. If you buy shoes, you might need socks. If you convince the customer to buy socks, you get multiple benefits. Cash you wouldn't have otherwise generated. Multiple-category purchases that increase long-term customer value. The possibility of between-cycle purchases that wouldn't otherwise exist. Yes, you just unlocked customer value.

In one of my hobbies (headphones), there is an iem guru named Crinacle. He reviewed iems, he sold iems, then he began to sell his own iems (no small endeavor). He began with a limited run (something like a thousand) of his own creation, called Project Meta. That thing sold out in an hour.

Lesson: Unlock customer value by offering something that won't be available later today.

From there, he released his next model, the Daybreak. V-shaped to Neutral sounding, good value.

Recently, he released his Diablo and Divine iems, planar drivers. The Diablo is bassy!

And then? He released a headphone "dongle", a device that works between your iPhone and your iem, a portable dac/amp, the Protocol Max. There we go ... a new category ... he's unlocking customer value, isn't he? Now the customer can spend additional money not otherwise generated via iems.

It's an old playbook.

Back in the early 90s at Lands' End we sprung up specialty businesses like weeds! A $70,000,000 specialty business was generally (on average) 70% incremental ... meaning $49,000,000 was "unlocked customer value" and $21,000,000 was cannibalized from the core business.

And that's where things get tricky. You have to run a p&l not on the $70,000,000 but instead on on the $49,000,000 of unlocked customer value. The expense structure for a $70,000,000 business is matched up with just $49,000,000 of revenue. If the p&l works, you've truly unlocked customer value. If it doesn't work? Try something else.

Yeah, I know, that's a lot of hard work.

There's a reason people default to loyalty points and customer service topics ... they're infinitely easier to implement. The problem, of course, is that you are selling the same merchandise assortment, so your ability to leverage these tools is limited. But there are tools. For example, Headphones.com offers 365 day returns on your headphone purchases. I mean, if you can't figure out if you like your headphones after 365 days, well, that's not the fault of the brand now is it? They're taking on enormous expenses, but they are also taking away all customer risk ... that unlocks customer value, it's hard to say how much, obviously.

When somebody suggests that Sears didn't "unlock customer value", woo-boy, that's a whopper. What were Sears Craftsman Tools? Tax preparation services? Sears Automotive? They went out of their way to find ways to serve their customers. You might not have liked the presentation of merchandise in stores, you might have thought their stores were dingy and old-fashioned, you might have found their departments under-staffed. Likely all true. All of those topics are operational in nature, obviously, those are all things we should be doing every single day to keep the wheels on the bus.

Unlocking customer value is something very different.

Which brings us to tomorrow's topic: Customer Retention.

Unlocking Customer Value, It Is INCREDIBLY HARD And Likely Doesn't Work

Have you ever walked the vendor hall at a trade show? You get an immediate view into the mindset of trade journalists and vendors when it comes to unlocking customer value.

"Connect with us on LinkedIn and you get a free pen!"
"Download our white paper on customer relationship marketing and we'll enter you into a drawing for a free iPad."
"Spin the wheel to discover the discount you earn on our AI-based email segmentation solution."

Yes, technically those are all elements of the "unlocking customer value" playbook. They're mindless and ineffective methods. But they are in the playbook.

It is INCREDIBLY HARD to unlock customer value ... which is why vendors and trade organizations default to free pens and drawings for a free iPad.

I recently analyzed a brand that had the following dynamics:

2015:

35% rebuy rate, $200 spend per repurchaser, $70.00 customer value. Average price per item purchased = $40.00.

2025:

35% rebuy rate, $265 spend per repurchaser, $92.75 customer value. Average price per item purchased = $53.00.

Did this brand "unlock customer value"? On the surface, yes! In reality, no. This company just raised prices by 2.9% per year for ten years ... approximately at the rate of inflation. The company discontinued old items, then introduced "new" items that were comparable but were more expensive.

Just for kicks and giggles, I asked Google to share with me what it means to "unlock customer value".

My goodness, is this a tired list. Relevant and efficient personalized shopping experiences? Reducing friction? Offering exclusive discounts? BOPIS? That's what Sears should have focused on?

Google AI continues.

Optimizing inventory is unlocking customer value? Is it any wonder we're in trouble?

AI wouldn't come up with this nonsense unless is scraped the internet to learn from Thought Leaders.

A brand that did a reasonably good job of unlocking customer value over time was Nordstrom. They were taken private last year. What happened to their stock price prior to being taken private?

Look at the 2015 - 2025 timeframe ... this is a retail brand that unlocked customer value as well as anybody ... they lost 69% of their market value over that time ... if you adjust for inflation the story is much worse.

So ... it's clear we really don't know what we're talking about when we talk about Unlocking Customer Value.

Tomorrow, we'll start exploring ideas for increasing retention, potentially loyalty, and profitability.

Unlocking Customer Value

Over on LinkedIn a Trade Journalist (#thoughtleader) assembled a white board argument illustrating the demise of Sears. The individual concluded that Sears focused on Real Estate when they should have focused on Unlocking Customer Value.

A former Sears employee chimed in that the company focused on unlocking customer value every single day.

I worked at Lands' End in the early 90s ... that company was likely the best I'd seen at "unlocking customer value" during that era.

I worked at Eddie Bauer in the late 90s ... a company that didn't perform well. That company worked every single day to "unlock customer value" via marketing tactics.

I worked at Nordstrom in the first two-thirds of the 00s ... a company that performed incredibly well. That company worked every single day to "unlock customer value" via merchandising strategy. Hint - you can unlock a crap-ton of customer value when customers love your merchandise and your merchandise is expensive.

I've worked with 300+ clients since founding my consultancy. I've yet to see a client fail to "unlock customer value". They're all trying. Hard. Of course these "brands" fail, everybody fails. But it's not for a lack of effort. The dumbest of companies still work hard to unlock customer value.

"Unlocking Customer Value" is something that outsiders say. Trade Journalists. Consultants. Agencies. Professors. They'll point to Starbucks or Target or Apple ... which only further demonstrates their inexperience with actual work at an actual brand. The rules for Starbucks, Target, and Apple are fundamentally different than are the rules at Wally's Widgets.

Retail is HARD WORK. And newsflash ... the people working in retail are not mindless zombies who somehow haven't conceived the idea of "Unlocking Customer Value".

There are two situations where "Unlocking Customer Value" becomes incredibly hard.

When merchandise productivity is in decline.
When your industry is being structurally disrupted.

Both situations are ugly.

When customers don't like what you sell (think Lands' End in 2015-2016 when, as the kids say, "things happened"), "unlocking customer value" is terribly difficult. If anything, your customer base "unlocks value" by purchasing overstocked liquidation junk at 70% off, bailing you out of a catastrophic inventory dilemma.
When you are being structurally disrupted (as retailers and catalogers were in the past quarter century), you are "unlocking customer value" by pushing customers online. The problem is that there are consequences. As you (smartly) pushed your customers online, you emptied out the store. Once the store is emptied out, why is it there? It shouldn't be there, it's unprofitable! That's the point in time when Real Estate has value. You can slow-play that one for decades if you like, you can potentially go bankrupt, restructure everything, and move forward. You can just slog through for a half-decade or decade and not be terribly profitable. You can find a buyer, go private, and do the hard work in secret. Either way, there are consequences. There are always consequences. Same thing in catalog marketing. You (smartly) move your customers online, then the variable cost of the catalog becomes an encumbrance to your profit and loss statement. You either cut the cord, you slow-play it for ten or fifteen years and contract, or you ride it into the sunset. There are always consequences.

If you "observe" or "write" about the industry, you don't have to "deal" with actual challenges. This means you get to assign blame, but you're never in a situation where you are assigned accountability.

We can argue "how" well "brands" managed structural disruption.

It's quite another thing to suggest that "brands" didn't "unlock customer value".

Handing Off The Baton

That final scene in Stranger Things, where the baton was handed off from the kids who became adults to the next generation of kids, that's some good stuff.

I've watched my new subscribers and unsubs post-COVID. There are more unsubs than new subscribers. Not a big shift, but more. I recognize many of the unsubs ... some have been reading this blog for two decades. There's a clear trend.

Many (most) unsubs are people either no longer working at catalog brands or are people who have likely retired from catalog brands.
New subs largely represent a new generation of marketers, and their interests are "different" ... which is reflected in the different direction I've taken my writing post-COVID.

The baton is being handed off.

In track and field, when the baton is handed off, the next runner gets to run that leg. The influence of the prior runner is only reflected by the position the new runner possesses in relation to other competitors.

A year ago (ish) a catalog professional reached out to me, commenting on how this person wanted the "new generation" to "embrace catalogs". This professional mentioned that he was trying to teach younger professionals about the art and science of catalog marketing, but "they just don't seem to care".

Correct. They don't care. They don't care about merge/purge theory. The don't care about wrongly matching social orders to a catalog. They don't care about co-ops/lists. They don't think that #printisback. They don't care about the "fact" that 77% of Gen-Z prefers print. They don't care about postal discounts. They don't care about postal advocacy in politics. They don't care about order curves. They don't care about QR codes printed on page 128. They don't care about page 128. They don't care about remails. They don't care about RFM segmentation.

They don't care. You handed the baton off to them. It's their race now. You can cheer them on. You can't tell them how to run. It's out of your control.

And I get it, for many readers that is frustrating. But it was that way when you were young. When you were a young professional, you played a role in shifting retail from downtowns to suburban malls ... you played a role in moving catalogs from big books to monthly small books. Somebody wanted you to embrace tradition. You didn't care. They handed the baton off to you, you ran with it. You ran your own race.

In 2026, we're increasingly handing off the baton. It's a good thing!

More important - over the next five years, the ecommerce generation hands the baton off to the AI generation. That's gonna be something to watch.