Insights to Action Series [Part 3 – New to Brand]

By Liz Emery, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Affinity Solutions

Insights to Action

Welcome back to Affinity’s “Insights to Action” blog series, exploring how to use Consumer Purchase Insights to solve complex business problems.  Consumer Purchase Insights provides a complete, granular view of customer and prospect purchase behaviors, across and between brands and categories, to inform a wide array of growth strategies based on deeper audience understanding. This is part 3 of an 8-part series where we dive into different examples of how to gain insights into – who your consumers are, how they spend, and where they buy – to inspire meaningful action. Part 1: Market Share and Part 2: Cross-Shop  of the series are live!

Part 3: New to Brand

New to brand is the total percentage of new consumers using your products or services during a set time frame. As marketers, we are often asked questions around our brand acquisition.

• How am I doing at attracting new customers to my brand?
• How much revenue do my new customers account for each month?
• What impact does a 2% decrease in monthly new customers have on my bottom line?
• What location/state/country is driving the highest number of new customers? Why?
• Are my paid media efforts in Chicago driving new customers?

The Problem

Acquisition is widely recognized as the most important marketing activity for many brands as new customers drive business growth and increase revenue opportunity. Ask most marketers their number one priority and they will tell you it is acquiring new customers. CEOs, CMOs, and investors talk about acquisition rates, cost-per-acquisition, acquiring higher-value customers, acquiring younger customers, and so on.

The definition of “new customers” varies based on the purchase cycle of each product and service, but understanding the true fiscal impact of new customers is not always measured. By drilling down into the purchase data of new customers vs repeat (or existing) customers, brands can have insight into metrics that quickly identify threats i.e., the impact from a decrease in new customers month over month to overall revenue. These insights can be used to justify investments and alter strategy – from marketing to product.

Using Insights to Create an Action Plan

When we speak to most brands and retailers, new-to-brand means a customer who shopped the brand in the current month, but not the previous 12-months. For the following examples, we will use this definition.

In the chart below, we see in December, 17.5% of all transactions for a sports betting platform were “new to the brand,” accounting for 6.2% of all sales that month.

Let’s investigate the acquisition efforts for this same sports betting platform to pull out actionable insights they can use for stronger results (in this example, we are focusing on the US only). When we drill-down to examine acquisition by market and by segment, we find that the brand is doing great with Gen X’ers in the Midwest, but poorly with that same segment in the Northeast. These insights should be used to drive targeted marketing campaigns (by market and demo) to grow share. Even a 1% shift for this sports betting app has an enormous impact on their bottom line.

In some categories, the lookback period might change from 12-months to 6-months or even 1-month. In streaming for example, we see cost conscious millennials who cannot afford to subscribe to 4-5 streaming services at the same time. Instead, they might choose to “jump around” from month to month. In January for example, they might binge-stream on Netflix, drop the service and then jump over to HBO Max and binge for the month of February, then drop HBO Max and jump over to Disney+ in March, and so on. Dashboarding streaming behavior requires a 1-month lookback. These insights can help networks and their agencies monitor customer acquisition, churn, and migration which can influence exactly how these streaming companies target new users.

By using new to brand insights, you can identify the impact new customers and acquisition efforts have on business success to justify investments across the organization. To learn more about Consumer Purchase Insights new to brand reach out to Sales@affinitysolutions.com or visit our website https://www.affinity.solutions.

That wraps up Insights to Action [Part 3 – New to Brand]! Stay tuned for Insights to Action [Part 4 – Churn], where we dive into the value of understanding the rate at which customers stop purchasing a good and/or service over a given time and what that means for a business’s health.