Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

60%

In sports, the trend is moving toward building small stadiums. Colorado State comes to mind a few years ago. Northwestern this year, building a 35,000 seat stadium. Instead of probably not selling an inexpensive seat four thousand feet above the field, premium seats with premium experiences are sold at premium prices. Five thousand highly enthusiastic and/or wealthy individuals pay a ton more, the remaining 30,000 pay more.

Similar things are happening in ecommerce. The "middle" of the customer file is simply disappearing, being replaced by either one-time buyers that the brand needs to generate a handsome profit on the acquisition transaction ... or ... loyal buyers are subsidizing the core business.

I've told you this many times ... I define a loyal buyer as somebody who has a 60% or greater chance of buying again in the next year. As we continue to lose all of the "middle" customers to Amazon, the loyal buyer audience becomes increasingly important, because without them there is no profit.

In sports, this audience gets premium experiences, given what they're paying.

In ecommerce?

If I had to make a prediction for the future, I'd predict that "somebody smart" will figure out how to give premium experiences to loyal buyers. Not points. Not discounts. Not BOGOs. Not free shipping. No. Somebody smart is going to figure out what the premium experiences are that are unique to your best customers. Amazon figured it out - you pre-spend just south of $200 a year and somebody delivers the solar yard lights you purchased at 8:58pm tonight by 7:00am the next morning. Oh, the premium experience also includes NFL football games and NBA basketball games and NASCAR and first-run television series and Pickleball TV.

That's what we are competing against.

Have your analytically minded guru score your customer file ... have her tell you how many customers you have that have a 60% or better chance of buying again next year ... have her do this quarterly for the past three years. Have her show you what is happening to your loyal customer base. Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Is it contracting faster than the rest of your twelve-month buyer file?

If your analyst won't perform the work, contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and I'll do it for you. Figure out how many premium customers you have, figure out what you can do for them.

Triggers / Targeting / Personalization

On my last trip to Europe, a vendor was telling a conference attendee how he had a client that was dynamically merchandising a catalog. The client had creative for several hundred products, the client sent the vendor customer purchase transactions, and the vendor assembled a personalized catalog for every customer based on prior purchase transactions. The conference attendee looked at the vendor, and said (I'm paraphrasing here):

"That takes all the fun out of creating a catalog."

The conference attendee walked away. The vendor sales person look at me and said"

"I don't understand why almost no catalog professionals realize that we're trying to help them. This happens to us all the time."

Professionals understand that the vendor was trying to help ... and would likely generate more profit.

Maybe you feel this way about your job. Have you ever had a new management team take over your department? A new Vice President? And she doesn't like how you are doing things, so she starts telling you that the way you're doing your job is "wrong" and she prescribes a new way to do things? You feel angry. You believe that she "doesn't get it!" You dig your heels in. You go through the five stages of grief. If you've ever been in this situation, you are reflecting the "that takes all the fun out of creating a catalog" statement above. You are that person!

I've been there.

There are three things that are incongruent with campaign-centric styles of marketing.

Trigger-based marketing.
Customer targeting.
Personalization.

It's one of the reasons some old-school marketers slide into email campaign execution seamlessly. It's a campaign. Everybody gets the same thing. Creation is fun!

It's one of the reasons some old-school marketers slide into social media. It's a campaign. All 199,000 followers get one message, with the added benefit that 25 of the recipients provide feedback. It feels good! Each message is a carefully created campaign.

Meanwhile, AI will usher in an era of machine-oriented triggers / targeting / personalization that will be outside of anybody's control. For many, that's going to take all the fun out of creating. For other professionals, it will be their turn to help run a business.

PostPilot

I don't talk about vendors a whole lot, for good reason. Early in my consulting work I'd be asked to partner with various vendors, the vendors would let my clients down, my clients would stop working with me for recommending a vendor ... you get the picture.

So, I don't have a relationship with anybody at PostPilot (click here). I haven't been asked to say anything about PostPilot.

I will say that a portion of their services are calibrated to helping the catalog brands that still remain.

Print-based marketing is in trouble, and has been for twenty years. Why should you spend $1 sending paper to a customer just because the customer hasn't purchased in 30 months and "might" be a reactivation candidate? Well, the reason you are doing that is because people at your company LOVE creating catalogs. They LOVE the process. They LOVE creatively enticing a customer via a spread. They LOVE the process, regardless of profit.

Profit.

Until the generation of catalog buyers (I'm not talking about the retailers that mail catalogs as branding pieces and don't care about profitability) is no longer employed, the profitability of mailing efforts will continue to erode. This will force those who adore print into a corner (it has been doing this for twenty years).

To maintain the craft, the catalog-centric professional must focus only on the most productive customers ... the most loyal customers ... or the most recently active customers. These will be the only two viable audiences going forward.

Which brings me back to PostPilot. Now, I get it, you want to merchandise 64 pages, you don't want trigger-based marketing via post cards, that's not what you love doing. The "market" doesn't care what you love doing. The "market" is giving you a small window of opportunity to do something via print.

Customers who have done "something recently" ... clicked through an email campaign, visited your website, signed up for credit, purchased, interacted with your social media presence ... these customers are profitable via print for a very small period of time. Why wouldn't you capitalize on this small period of time? With print? With the craft you love?

Again, I don't have a relationship with anybody at PostPilot, I haven't been asked to say anything, I just see a small window in the customer relationship process where you could "do something with print" and it "could/should be profitable". I mean, I'd rather leverage email marketing for everything given it costs essentially nothing and a postcard is going to cost at least $0.60, but a portion of my audience loves print, so have at it.

Infrequent Buyers

In about three weeks, a large fraction of your inactive customer file will awaken, briefly. For about 6-7 weeks thereafter, customers who purchase gifts ... customers who like winter-centric merchandise ... they'll awaken after a pummeling of email campaigns over the prior 44 weeks when the gift/winter-centric customer could have cared less.

And then? They'll go quiet again.

In 1999 at Eddie Bauer, our Home customers went dormant as a matter of practice. They bought bedding or pillows or whatever, then their needs were met. We'd waste a fortune mailing catalogs to an audience that was largely dormant. My team got tired of being blamed for low response ... "DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO TARGET CUSTOMERS??" ... well, yeah, we knew how to target customers, it's just that the customers the company wanted us to target were dormant. So we rented the living daylights out of the Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn file, and those names worked! Those customers had not just purchased our merchandise.

Obviously it's a different world in 2026. Regardless, you have your product listing ads ready for the dormant customers who are ready to bite. You have a fundamentally different email marketing cadence for the portion of your email subscriber file that is dormant for ten+ months then highly active for 6-7 weeks. Your website recognizes the formerly dormant customer and treats that customer differently.

Take advantage of the tools at your disposal for managing infrequent buyers. This is your time to shine ... it's not a Black Friday / Cyber Monday 60% off opportunity, it's an opportunity to enhance the customer relationship with infrequent customers.

The Long and Winding Road

Your business performance is undoubtedly due to decisions you recently made.

It's also the outcome of decisions made 1-3 years ago.

I worked with a company that threw away winning merchandise ... they just killed a bunch of items, replacing them with stuff that didn't work. Customers acquired 3-5 years ago were loyal to a style of merchandise that they were acquired from. It took this company about thirty months to rebuild the merchandise assortment and ultimately identify new winning items that were aligned with the winning items from 3-5 years ago.

Do you want to know one of the huge benefits of having a 15% or 20% annual rebuy rate? Rebuilding your business is not a long and winding road! You can reinvent your customer base annually! The low-retention businesses I've been aligned with constantly reinvent themselves, they aren't beholden to the past. It's a feature of this business model.

If you are Macy's and you have a customer base with a 60% annual rebuy rate? You can't reinvent anything!! You are truly on a long and winding road, you're not driving the car and your customers own the keys to your car. Any change you make is met with criticism from your long-time loyal customer base. Pundits mock companies like Macy's for not being willing to change or evolve with the times. Pundits are wrong ... companies like Macy's cannot change or evolve with the times or their existing customer base will reject them. They're stuck. It's a huge disadvantage for having a loyal customer base. You're quite honestly better off creating new brands than trying to reinvent the existing brand, your loyal customers won't let you reinvent the existing brand.

Both the low-rebuy ecommerce brand and the loyalty-centric retail brand need to develop new items that become winning items. This part of business is universal, and it's a lot of fun for the marketer/analyst who decides to help grow the business via great items.

Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

60%

Triggers / Targeting / Personalization

PostPilot

Infrequent Buyers

The Long and Winding Road

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