Are Bargain Hunters gnawing at your bottom line and can you identify them?

Marketing Week reported, that the British online fashion retailer Asos identified 6 percent of its active customers as having a disproportionately negative impact on profitability. Long-time losses are due to the 6 percent's reliance on discounted items and returns. The harm to Asos' bottom line is substantial, over £100 million (almost 115 million euros).

The CEO of Asos, José Antonio Ramos Calamonte, assured that the company will be "undertaking more refined action, using a more personalised approach to incentivise positive behaviours."

Identifying bargain hunters in Custobar

Personalising marketing is always a good idea, but what if there would be a system or a tool in place to identify the customers relying heavily on discounted items? Well, with Custobar, the segmentation is actually really easy!

Using the field sale.discount, you are able to segment “Customers who have a sale with a discounted amount greater than or equal to 1€”.

To that filter, you can add a minimum and a maximum amount. In this example, you can create the segmentation “Customers with at least two sales with a discount of 1€ or greater.

If you want, you can further refine this segment by excluding customers who also made purchases without discounts. That will help single out the real Bargain Hunters. For that, you create a search for sale discount is Less than or equal to 0€.

Dragging this search to the “Exclude area” of the segmentation tool gives you the narrow segment of the true Bargain Hunters.

From here, a lot can be done! You can use the bulk update feature to tag those customers, create a targeted message for them, set up a lookalike audience for your ads campaigns… The choice is yours.

Reward positive behaviour by identifying the Full-Price Shoppers

Now that you’ve identified the Bargain Hunters, you can reverse the logic and to highlight positive behaviours. For example, a search for customers with a sales count of 10 or more, excluding any customer with a discount of 1€ or greater, will give you a narrow segment of customers with a lot of unique purchases. These Full-Price Shoppers don’t rely on discounts.

Here as well, the resulting segment can be used in many different ways. Send them a personalised message, tag them for easy identification in physical stores, or invite them to a special event. The list is long, when it comes to nurturing your most precious customers. 

Who has been using coupon codes?

Elaborating on the point of incentivising positive behaviour, one option is to create an audience of people who have been using coupon codes you have given for your clients. As a prerequisite, you should include the used coupon codes in the sales sent to Custobar from your ecommerce or ERP.

After doing so, you can do a simple search for people who have been using coupon codes when buying from you. These people obviously react positively to discount codes. You can use this insight, too, to your tactical advantage and target this group of customers as a segment of their own.