After fully identifying customers, companies still need to select their target customers for the following reasons:
(1) The target customers of a company are not all online customers.
In an e-commerce environment, the needs of different customers are different. The website’s own resources are also limited. Only a part of the customers in the market can become actual buyers of the company’s products or services, and the rest are non-customers. Therefore, wasting time, energy and money on non-customers who are unwilling or unable to buy is not good for the company. Online customers bring different benefits to the company. High-quality online customers bring great value, ordinary customers bring little value, and low-quality customers bring negative value and may even bring risks to the company. Only by finding their own customers more accurately can companies survive and develop better.
(2) Correctly selecting online customers helps the company’s positioning.
Different customer groups are different. If a company does not select customers, it cannot develop appropriate products or services for its target customers. Moreover, the coexistence of different customers in a company may also cause confusion in the company’s positioning, resulting in customers having an unclear impression of the company’s image. On the contrary, if the enterprise takes the initiative to select customers and clearly defines customer positioning, it will be able to establish a good image for the enterprise. Not all buyers are customers of the enterprise, and not all customers can bring huge profits to the enterprise. Successfully developing customers and achieving customer loyalty is the correct choice of customers. For example, the initial development strategy of Suning.com was to rely on offline home appliance sales channels and use online home appliance sales as a breakthrough. During its development, Suning.com took into account that the target audience of home appliances is mostly male, and adopted some targeted strategies, such as increasing the sales of small products such as razors, thereby effectively stimulating the increase in order volume and increasing the traffic and popularity of the website. As Suning.com becomes more mature, decision makers gradually consider the gender ratio of buyers in the entire mall and consciously increase the purchase volume of female consumers. On September 25, 2012, Suning.com officially announced that it would spend US$66 million to acquire Redbaby, China’s largest maternal and child e-commerce website, which greatly promoted a customer balance of Suning’s entire e-commerce platform. It can be seen that selecting target customers is conducive to the accurate positioning of enterprises and the implementation of corporate strategies.