Research highlighted in Knowledge@Wharton suggests that customer segmentation needs to take into account ‘clumpiness’, a consumption pattern of inactivity interrupted by short buying bursts. The authors recommend adding clumpiness as a fourth dimension when doing segmentation based on recency, frequency, and monetary value. When looking at customers that have churned, ‘clumpy’ customers are valuable to reactivate because they will come back and be clumpy again.
Clumpiness varies by individual. For example, “women tend to be more clumpy than men. We’ve found that younger people tend to be more clumpy in their consumption than older people. “ They also looked at media channels to reach clumpy customers, findings that email has more of short-term effect, while catalog has a longer term effect.
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