TibetanTailor

You want more money? More sales? How about having your current customers buy your product(s) more frequently.

Try the Entrainment Recipe (entrainment is about synchronization, alignment between two organisms, systems, etc. It is the dance between your customers’ lives and your webpresence)

A simple approach strategy to increase sales is thus to increase frequency of purchase.

But how do you do that? How to do that within user centered design?

An Entrainment Recipe (A delicious blending of web use sugar and customer life-cycle flour)

Ingredients

1 cup           Good understanding of your customers’ lifecycles
1 pound     Good understanding of how frequent they use your site
2 oz             Design thinking on how to support their lifecycle on your site

1. Find out how frequent do your customers use your website.
2. Find out what your current customers’ “rounds” are. (A daily/weekly/monthly/yearly “round” is the re-occuring cycle of activities.)
3. Determine the current “entrainment” between your customers and your website.
4. Determine what frequency you want to go for (which is of a shorter cycle time than you found in step 1)
5. Figure out how you will support (this might involve new features, functions, or even product/service assortments.)

Basically, If you first look at the activities that your customers are doing (their frequency), then figure out in which ways you can entrain your website with what your customers are doing on a more frequent cycling than what they are currently doing.

So, give this recipe and I’d love to hear how it tastes to you.

Examples

• Perhaps you have a payment schedule that occurs on a monthly basis, why not entrain your users with that monthly cycle. WOW!
• A sad example thought might be those ISPs that try to falsely entrain the users with e-mail use. Yet that is more of a interrruption tactic, whereas google uses a more subtle associated tactic.
• Look back to my diagram connecting Structure, Function, and Process, you can see how to show the relationship between customer activities and web presence.

References

How do you measure frequency of purchase?

Entrainment definitions in Wikipedia (a variety)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.