It is a fact that our clients should become the central point for all actions we do in our business and if someone does not understand this, will be confined to despair and misery;)

However, one might ask who are our customers? Is it a client that once bought something from us the same than a client that buys regularly? To answer these questions and many more is that marketers should segment their customer data base so that they identify the most profitable and loyal customers.

Everyone can segment their customers in the manner suits better, taking into account the characteristics of your business and the indicators that will give better information about their customers, such as: age, repeat purchase, customers from a client ( recommended), etc.

In general terms our customers can be classified into 5 or 6 groups (you’ll see it can be 5 or 6), let’s see …

Within the range of clients, that are not clients yet in every sense of the word, but are potential customers or prospects, the classification can be divided into 2 groups:

Suspects: it refers to the entire universe of people, all the available market, regardless of whether or not they are prospective customers.

Prospects: all persons, within the group of suspects, that meet our customer profile and who are potential buyers.

Now, within the group of customers, we can classify them as follows:

Buyers: who are the customers that bought us some time, may have been once or twice, but are not regular purchasers of our business.

Clients: these are customers that buys repeatedly from us, always have the need, they come back and buy from us.

Defenders and Sellers: These can be classified together or separately (for this reason we may have 5 or 6 groups). Defenders are customers who buy and defend our brand and products from the offers of the competition. The vendors are very similar to the defenders but also promote our brand and products in an active way, are so convinced that our products are the best, that promote them to everyone they know, becoming in some way sellers of our company.

Knowing what percentage of customers, from our entire customer data base, belong to each group, helps us make better decisions, both for customer service purposes and marketing, not only in the development of better offers, but also in client behavioral research, needs and desires of the customer segment to which our business is conducted.