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Maximize Revenue with a Complete Picture of your Customers’ Capacity to Spend

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Luxury brands face tough competition to capture and retain high net worth customers. They are now facing competition from non-luxury brands, who have been gaining traction, and wallet share, among HNW individuals. In 2016, Nike was ranked the most valuable apparel brand in the world, overtaking Louis Vuitton, and Kia, a non-luxury vehicle, came out on top in J.D. Power’s quality car survey.

Luxury brand or not, the competition is fierce to both attract and keep the attention of HNW customers. Their business can make a huge impact on your business. A Bain & Company study found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 7% and that the average amount spent by a repeat customer was two-thirds more than a new customer.

Because of the current landscape, it is imperative for brands, both luxury and non-luxury, to prioritize and segment their customer base and identify who they should focus their time and budget on in their marketing campaigns. One approach is to use transactional history, however, spend history does not equate to spend ability, so you need to be more granular.

Previous spending is a key component, but it should not be the only data point you’re using. Instead, focus your efforts on identifying the low spend, high net worth customers among your current database. Think about it – a customer may have purchased something for $100 when they actually have the capacity to buy something that’s $1,000. Use this information to personalize your sales and marketing outreach and present higher cost items.

Remember, not all existing customers have the capacity or ability to spend more with you. Identifying those that do are critical to enhancing revenue and driving a higher customer lifetime value.

Contact us for more information on analyzing your customer base and identifying those with the capacity and net worth to spend more.

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CEO Mark Logan on Marketing to Gen X, Y, & Z

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On Wednesday, May 3, our CEO, Mark Logan, joined senior executives and decision makers at the 2nd annual Luxury Roundtable hosted in New York City by Luxury Daily. The goal of the roundtable was to discuss a serious issue facing luxury marketers: how to drive and sustain demand from Generations X, Y and Z whose shopping habits are strikingly different from the silent generation and baby boomers.

Mark joined a panel of experts to discuss “Ecommerce and Mobile: Symbol of the New Path to Purchase.” The focus of their session was how to deploy online and mobile channels to generate new business while retaining existing customers for generations who live on their smartphones. Mark shared how WealthEngine can provide useful insights on customer segmentation and the critical importance of personalization.

WealthEngine has put together a useful resource to help luxury marketers use predictive analytics and modeling. You can download it here.

For more on the roundtable, including slides and other panel summaries, click here.

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Marketing to the affluent millennial consumer, everything you need to know

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Marketing to the affluent millennial consumer is going to be a key skill for luxury companies. There is constant chatter about millennials and whether they work hard or are hardly working. It is time to put this debate aside and pay attention.

Why are affluent millennials important to luxury companies?

Millennials are going to have a big impact on our economy.  This means that you cannot discount them and their growing wealth. The number of wealthy millennials in the United States is increasing. Millennials make up nearly a quarter of affluent U.S. households. Where does their wealth come from?

Their wealth, in fact, can be attributed to inheritance and early professional success in the technology industry.

Affluent millennials are a key consumer segment. Moreover, you might find yourself competing against other luxury brands for their attention. Marketing to affluent millennials will need a new outlook. If you haven’t already, it’s time to start shifting your thinking and strategy. Luxury consumers are more valuable when they are younger as they spend 1.5 to 2 times more than older affluents. Their expenditure applies to both luxury goods and services.

How can you successfully market to the affluent millennial consumer?

To truly engage the affluent millennial, you need to learn everything you can about them. This will help you personalize not only your messaging but also the whole customer experience. Here are some ways you can better understand and market to affluent millennials:

WealthEngine’s Step by Step guide: Marketing to the Affluent Millennial Consumer

Step 1

Start by understanding the impact of millennials on your business. Affluent millennials show greater brand loyalty than other generations. Therefore, luxury retailers should strive to understand this group and their spending habits. You should have a good idea of the economic benefit this group can bring to your specific brand.

WealthEngine’s client, an iconic US-based Luxury brand, realized an ROI of 340% in just 60 days of running a direct mail campaign. The campaign helped them gain nearly 3x more revenue per customer. They were able to accomplish this by targeting a list of 22,000 households with $5M or above in net worth, and specific demographic and lifestyle attributes. Thus, their understanding of their customer led to a marked increase in revenue.

Step 2

Next, you should build on the information you already have by appending wealth, income, lifestyle and affinity information. What interests or attributes do they have in common? Do a majority of them live in one area? This information is key because it’s specific to your brand and your millennial buyers.

WE Screen can add these key attributes to your existing data. Through screening, you can develop a holistic picture of your millennial customers. Marketing to the affluent millennial customer begins with understanding their capacity to spend and their interests.

Step 3

Once you know the characteristics of your top millennial buyers it’s time to find more just like them. WE Analyze creates a look-alike model. This means you can take your screening data and run it through analyze. The solution then finds common traits and patterns among your top customers in this segment. These patterns can help you find more prospects just like them.

For example, you can find out that your customers are all between the ages of 28 and 32. Further, you can find that they are all concentrated in the Bay Area. This helps you find more prospects like them. Your marketing can already be directed to the older, affluent millennial in the Bay Area. Doing this would help you find prospects you might have previously overlooked. Secondly, it prevents you from spending on younger millennials who may not relate as strongly to your brand.

Step 4

Marketing to affluent millennials cannot be a one size fits all solution. Therefore, you shouldn’t market to all affluent millennials with a single message. This will not resonate with some of them. Be smart and focus on the ones that most resemble your customers. Then, you should personalize your message to this group.

Step 5

Finally, don’t disregard the power of taking immediate action.  Consumers are 22% more likely to consider a brand as a result of real-time marketing. Your customers and prospects engage with your website and other channels on a daily basis. Identify affluent millennials are as they interact with your channels. This will help you personalize their experience on the fly.

For instance, let’s say your website sells luxury shoes ranging from $200- $2000. Knowing your customer’s spending capacity and interests will allow you to customize their experience. If you know that affluent millennial user 1 prefers high-heels in the $600 range, the website can start showing products in that range. If user 2 prefers sneakers in the $300 range, then the experience can reflect those preferences right when they open your website.

What Else You Need to Know

There is an added benefit to marketing to the affluent millennial consumer. Engaging with and cultivating them now can help you build long-term brand loyalty and lifetime customers.

Increase your understanding of the affluent millennial consumer, contact us to learn more.

Additional Articles:

Know Your Millionaire: Single Millennials

Redefining “Luxury Brand” for Your Luxury Marketing Strategy

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How Can Luxury Marketers Use Social Currency to Drive Business Results?

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Do you know your customers? No, do you really know your customers? As a luxury provider, you may not know them as well as they know you. You’re used to delivering a personal experience to customers you’ve won over, but the only way to attract new customers is to really understand what makes them tick. And that means creating “social currency” with them.

Simply said, social currency is the stuff we talk about with our friends, colleagues, and family. In a marketing context, it concerns the extent to which we share a brand or information about a brand with others in our everyday social lives at work, home, or in virtual social networks.

One of the biggest challenges facing luxury marketers today is how to take social media beyond just another communications channel, and use it to drive bottom line results. Social currency provides the answer.  By creating social currency — that person-to-person buzz — marketers can support their objectives of:

  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Maintaining brand relevance
  • Improving customer experiences with their brand

Marketers can successfully drive the conversation and create more social currency by learning more about their customers and speaking directly to them. With big data, data analytics and strategic social media initiatives, marketers can now know more about their customers than ever before, and personalize communications to an extent never before possible. From purchase behavior to demographics to life style affinities, marketers can not only personalize the dialogue, they can also deliver the message in the channel that will get the best response.

As a luxury marketing professional, it is extremely important to understand the mindset of wealthy consumers, and that not all wealthy consumers are alike.  You must take into consideration both the demographic and psychographic profile of your clients. Most importantly, you must go beyond judgment into a deeper understanding of what makes your target audience tick.

The better you understand about what matters most to your customers and the better you can speak directly to those needs, the more social currency you will create. Social currency will deliver more brand awareness, brand relevance, and better customer experiences, which will drive bottom line business results and referrals.

If you’d like to learn more about using big data and analytics to get into the mind of your customers, check out our free ebook: The Luxury Marketer’s Guide to Engaging and Winning HNW Customers. This simple guide will show you how to understand your customers beyond their purchasing history and walks through the strategies that innovative luxury brands are using today to increase marketing and campaign effectiveness.

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Drive 2016 Holiday Strategies with Big Data

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Fall and holiday planning is in full swing and customer-centric brands have an opportunity to drastically improve the consumer experience – with wealth data. Wealth data has become the “must have” data point for brands and retailers who know how to maximize their consumer marketing and create the most relevant and profitable experience for each segment of their database.

The emergence of new structures for rich data allows for the unprecedented ability for brand marketers to truly deliver highly personalized, one-to-one e-commerce experiences. As we know, today’s consumers are pros at ignoring mass media and listening only to what they want to hear. But, with access to and with the effective use of Big Data, brands can enhance consumer experiences with contextual relevance that allows for engagement at precise moments when customers are most persuadable. Applying contextual relevance to digital customer experiences is often overlooked by marketers, yet it can make all the difference in delivering value propositions that get to the heart of a customer’s buying criteria.

In this competitive landscape, it doesn’t matter if marketers are focusing on direct mail, email, mobile, or digital strategies. The focus is the same. It is critical for marketers to pinpoint their prospects in unique and compelling ways. Utilizing wealth, demographic and lifestyle parameters are an effective way to leverage the attributes of your best customers to generate a targeting strategy and a voice that will resonate with that audience.

For more information on prioritizing your buyers and prospects using wealth data check out our webinar Improve Consumer Experiences and Drive Revenue in the 2016 Holiday Season Using Wealth Data.

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Retailers Use Data-Driven Marketing for Holiday Promotions

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Every year consumers lament that they don’t even get through Halloween before they start getting inundated with holiday marketing pitches. This is compounded with the complaints companies are starting to receive around their remarketing. If a consumer has just made a purchase from a retailer, the last thing they want is a barrage of offers to buy the very same handbag they just purchased. Right?

So what can you do this year to improve your results and empower consumers to do more of their holiday shopping with you?

Here are a few tactics to incorporate into your overall marketing strategy for the holidays.

  • Screen your current customers based on wealth to determine the appropriate targeted promotion.
    • Base your discount offer on their net worth. For example, you might offer $10 off a $100 purchase to one segment and $50 off a $500 purchase to another depending on their income and assets.
    • Look at price points of products you would like to promote and feature those that align with the household income and spending capacity of your customers, specifically.
  • Develop a model of last year’s best customers now so you can segment and personalize your messaging when the time is right.
    • Take the data you already have around your customers and their buying behavior and then let WealthEngine help develop a model of your ideal customer using our wealth scores and analytics. By modeling your best customers, you can then create messaging to increase loyalty for increased business this year and capture market share from your competitors.
  • Surprise and delight new potential customers in a way that entices them to subscribe to your list in time for holiday offers.
  • Use exclusive events to capture the attention of your VIP customers and create a unique shopping experience.
    • Develop a geo-targeted list and further narrow it down based on wealth and lifestyle factors to bring new customers into your store. Consider hosting an event after-hours for this exclusive group, or provide VIP access in advance of your store opening and provide special offers and experiences for those in attendance. During the event, inspire sharing on social channels with lots of photo opportunities.
  • There are always people who wait to shop at the last minute, make sure your offer is the one that brings them joy vs stress.
    • Bucket your list into two segments: those who have already shopped with you during the holiday season and those who have not. For those who have purchased, be sure to suppress any offers they have already responded to and instead, build an offer based on their wealth and complementary products and services. For those who have yet to make a holiday purchase, be sure your offer is one they can’t refuse.

This year, smart marketers will take a more respectful approach and reap the rewards. With all the marketing noise between now and the holidays, the retailers who take the time to understand not only buying behavior, but also holiday budgets and capacity to spend, will win.

Want to find out more about how WE can help you with your holiday marketing this year?

Request a demo now.

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The New Audience of One

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In a recent TravelWeekly article, Emmanuel Perrin, CEO of Cartier North America, was the first to say it: “Client care is the final frontier…You can’t go wrong investing in client experience… What is good for the client is good for the retailer and is good for us.” Today’s luxury buyer might not be so easily seduced, at least not by brands. Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the research firm YouGov, presented the findings of the Survey of Affluence and Wealth, conducted in partnership with Time Inc. And those findings were mixed at best for the audience of luxury CEOs and marketing executives from the fashion, automotive, jewelry, beverage, retailing and travel industries.

Continue reading “The New Audience of One”

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The Rich & Single: America’s Wealthiest Bachelors & Bachelorettes

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In honor of Valentine’s Day, we thought it would be fun to look at America’s richest singles.  Did you know that majority of these bachelor and bachelorettes live in New York, California and Texas?  Or that the most charitable of these singles live in Florida, Connecticut and California?  Click the infographic below to learn more about the wealthiest single men and women.

WealthEngine goes beyond wealth to uncover key characteristics about individuals in the US and UK. Combining wealth, demographics, lifestyle interests, and social behavior, marketers and fundraisers use precision marketing to  find, engage, and influence in a way that matters.  

Continue reading “The Rich & Single: America’s Wealthiest Bachelors & Bachelorettes”