In this issue: Why you need to be looking for SuperFans all the time. How doing it means you need to be completely obsessed with 1st Party Data. And how finding them can help your own career fly. Really.

Experience

Back in the last millennium I got a job with Charles River Associates in Boston. I was a ‘Data Miner’. I coded in a language called SAS. Often for 60+ hours a week.

We used to joke that we’d been sent to the ‘Data Mines’. And the firm certainly saw us as disposable. I remember waking up underneath my desk on several mornings, because there wasn’t any time to go home.

There were tons of other juniors who could code circles around me. So I knew I was never going to be one of the top people.

But in several thousand hours of coding over two long years, I learned a couple of valuable things. First, that most ‘data science’ work, is actually about cleaning up the data.

Second, that I was good at breaking complex problems into smaller, simpler pieces. That’s now known as ‘first principles thinking’.

Did my time in the ‘Data Mines’ leave me with anything else? Absolutely. I developed a cast-iron belief that successful brands must obsess over their own 1st party data. And that stays with me to this day.

Reflection

Even if you’re not obsessing about your own 1st party data, your competition will be. And they may crush your brand just because they’re better at the basics.

Basics such as being able to answer questions like: “Who are my brand’s highest value customers today?”, “Are the audiences who I am targeting my brand’s predicted SuperFans?”, or “What advertising budget do I need to cut, because the cost of acquisition is higher than the profit brought in?”.

Here’s one foundational report that’s a great start:

Imagine that you acquired four transactions from Google Ads.

For every transaction, you looked up each customer who made that transaction, in your CRM.

If this customer never bought from you before, then the answer to the question ‘New to File?’ is a ‘no’. If they did buy before, then the answer to ‘New to File’ is a ‘yes’:

At this point, it really doesn’t matter what the exact lifetime value or LTV of these customers is. That’s something to delve into later.

What does matter is that to expand the customer base, to widen the base of the ‘customer pyramid’, a marketer needs to bring ‘fresh blood’, or always add new customers to the file. Every customer who is ‘New to File = no’, has a lower value. Every customer who is ‘New to File = yes’, has a higher value.

What’s the practical implication of this data? What if for a given period, you looked not just at Google Ads, but at your top four? media platforms. What if you found out, that while all four platforms have the same RoAS, the distribution of ‘new to file = yes’ varied:

This simple insight would tell you that even though from the lens of RoAS all channels are made equal, Google Ads is the platform to double-down on (or specific ad groups or ad campaigns within Google Ads), because that’s where you acquire new-to-file customers, who widen your customer or donor base.

References

You’ll find lots and lots of articles telling you how it’s more important to retain customers than to recruit new ones. That’s true, of course. It’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to find a new one. More than 10 times cheaper.

But before you can retain a loyal customer, you first have to recruit them as a customer. Period.

Which means you have to acquire them.

And you’re always going to be losing some customers, no matter how good your product or service is.

So you always have to be finding new blood.

And what you really want to be finding are SuperFans. These are new customers who you can predict at the point of acquisition will turn out to be among your most loyal. And that means most profitable.

The Holy Grail of direct marketing is identifying SuperFans at the point of recruitment.

When you do that, you can think of your acquisition program as part of your retention program – from the very beginning. Your program will be more profitable right from the start. And your Board, shareholders and peers – such as your CFO – will “love” you ;-).

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at Greg@moveupfaster.me or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

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