You probably spend too much time looking for strangers.
You negotiate a commission with someone who has never bought your product and, until last Tuesday, had probably never heard of you.
Then you open your customer list.
There they are.
Someone who has bought from you four times. They have tagged your brand in a post. They talk about the product without being prompted. And, almost as an afterthought, you discover they have 50,000 followers.
You have been paying to acquire this person while simultaneously trying to acquire someone else who looks exactly like them.
Your Customer List Is More Than Purchase History
Businesses often behave as though the only interesting people are standing outside their building.
They spend hours prospecting for influence when some of that influence is already attached to a name and a shipping address in their own system.
The data usually contains the clues. You just aren’t looking at them together.
Repeat Purchases Beat Follower Counts
A repeat purchase tells you something that a follower count doesn’t. Someone can collect 200,000 followers and still have no particular reason to care about your product.
But when you find someone who has voluntarily spent money with you several times, you already know something about the relationship. They bought because they wanted the thing.
The trail is sitting there in the numbers. You can see who returns and whether they respond to email.
Then you can look outside the transaction. Does this customer have somewhere to take their enthusiasm?
AKA Do they have distribution?
You already paid for the first relationship (the acquisition campaign). You paid for the chance to get this person into the ecosystem.
The opportunity is that their existing behavior and their audience are pointing in the same direction.
The Hard Part Starts When You Find Them
Once you start looking at customers this way, you also start noticing how much information gets stranded inside ordinary business routines.
The person managing retention looks at repeat purchase and the social team looks at mentions. Nobody necessarily thinks to put those signals on the same table.
So the opportunity sits in the gap between departments.
And when you finally find someone worth activating, you have a more interesting problem to solve.
Can your business survive being discovered by their audience?
Will a successful post from them can empty your best-selling SKU?
Prepare for success with the same seriousness you give to acquisition.
Check the offer. Check the landing page. Check inventory. Check the email and SMS flows. Check fulfillment. Check customer support.
Look for the ugly operational gaps nobody owns because, under normal circumstances, they don’t matter.
Volume has a way of finding those gaps for you.
The Growth You Need May Already Be There
You are often encouraged to think of growth as a search for something new, be it a new channel or a new partnership. Newness gives everyone something to chase.
But more often than not the most valuable discovery is retrospective.
You look at the people who have already chosen you and realize that one of them has been carrying the thing you have been trying to manufacture: trust.
They bought the product and they talked about it. Other people listened.
Somewhere inside your customer list, there may be someone whose influence you are currently trying to buy from a stranger.
Find them.
Things on my Desk
The Where’s It From series in which Lalá walks Berlin with designers who tell you the truth about where a business actually begins.
Angie’s truth starts with her hands.
From the Same Desk
- A technology can be powerful without being universally useful. The rhetoric surrounding AI deserves more suspicion than the technology itself.
- Fast fashion is being financially repackaged. The Vinted app and its cousins have built a secondary market so consumers buy the same volume with a cleaner conscience.
- Reading the data gives you access to information. Understanding it gives you agency over it.