For many digital businesses the most common user experience is the one that requires the least energy. A subscription business that measures inward clicks will find that an inward click with no sign-up will be the most common experience, and if a scroll down is measured then the most common experience will be a click and no scroll. Whatever is the minimum recordable experience an individual can have then that will be the most common thing they do. This is the minimum energy principle.
Since these low energy users are so numerous and their behavior strongly influences what is the average behavior for a customer. We often see companies seeing what can be done to encourage these low energy users into a more profitable mode of behavior but we have never seen a successful outcome from this approach and yet ‘unique visitors’ is the most quoted metric executives use to convince us their business is thriving.
The trimplicity approach
At the other end of the scale, every business has a small percentage of customers that generate a disproportionately large share of revenue say 5% that generate 50% or even 2% that generate 60%. Yet seldom is it seen that companies seek these customers specifically in their marketing efforts or consider them appropriately in their product decisions. It’s perhaps because it’s difficult to say at which particular point a person is definitely a core customer.
Yet these customers can be readily identifiable by their specific behaviors and although far from average if you asked an executive in the company to describe an average customer then you would hear a description of these ‘unusual’ core customers.
We in Trimplicity have based our business on helping companies in the digital space uncover these ‘core customers’ and profit by increasing them.
Why are they core?
- A core customer’s behavior is similar to the intended behavior of a customer of the service and therefore the service is a very close fit to their needs right now. They are far more energetic than the average customer. Their behavior is homogenous and different from lower energy customers.