Classifying different and potential customers is a necessary task for any organization if it seeks to improve profitability. In order to carry out this classification, it is necessary to know what criteria will be used to classify them, as well as how we are going to analyze them and evaluate whether that classification is appropriate. Do you want to know how to do it? They can be classified in three ways:
Customer classification according to the status:
- Current clients:These are the people who buy from you regularly, whether they are businesses or individuals. Ultimately, they are the ones who sustain your business.
- Active clients:These are customers who make purchases frequently and who have done so recently or within a time period established by the company. This time period will depend on the type of company or product.
- Inactive customers:These are customers who have made purchases, but outside the period established by the company. These are customers we can approach at some point to encourage them to buy from us again, after analyzing the reason for their cancellation, purchase frequency, etc.
- Potential clients:These are those who have not made purchases from the company, but who have shown interest through requests for information, requests for quotes, and who have purchasing power and can become income generators for the company at any time.
- Potential customers:These are customers who have never purchased from the company and have not expressed any interest in us. However, based on their characteristics, we believe they could become future revenue generators.
Customer classification based on turnover:
To perform this classification, we must start from the 80/20 principle; that is, 80% of your sales are generated by only 20% of your customers. Based on this, we would classify them as follows:
- Top Clients: These are the clients who generate sales volume well above average. They should be the fewest in number. The advantage of knowing them thoroughly is that we can define our efforts and resources accordingly.
- Large Clients: Customers who generate a medium-to-high sales volume. They are important, but they don't represent the volume of the top customers.
- Average Customers: These are the customers who generate an average sales volume.
- Low Customers: These are those whose sales are well below average.
Classification according to the purchase frequency:
Determine an average purchase frequency, and from there classify our customers.
- Frequent customers: It is very important to take special care of frequent customers and give them preferential treatment that makes them feel valued and thus maintain their level of purchases.
- Regular customers: It is advisable to keep these customers at an excellent level of satisfaction by generating activities that encourage an increase in frequency.
- Occasional customers: While it is true that occasional customers deserve to receive good service like all customers, the level of investment and attention to be allocated will be less than that provided to the most profitable customers for the company.
After classifying our customers, we must segment them if we want to develop an effective marketing strategy. To do this, we must keep in mind that although we categorize our customers, each customer has unique and different needs and interests, regardless of the group they belong to. Therefore, we need to group our customers according to specific variables. To segment our customers, we need a database that includes at least sales data, the products they buy, and their purchase frequency and quantity.
In conclusion, what we seek with segmentation is to know the types of customers we have and the strategy we can follow with each one.
