Despite their similarities, it's a mistake to look at female
customers as a single, monolithic group. Whether they're
entrepreneurs, employees or stay-at-home moms, women make buying
decisions based on vastly different criteria. Motivating your women
customers depends largely on understanding who they are and what
they want. For example, women business owners are less likely to
shop at malls, are more likely to shop from catalogs and prefer to
get in and out of stores more quickly when compared to women
employees, according to data from the Center for Women's
Business Research. Women business owners are also more than twice
as likely as women employees to contract for house-cleaning and
lawn-care services-a critical piece of information for those who
market cleaning franchises or landscape maintenance services.
To ensure your marketing messages resonate with your best female
customers, continually refine your target audience profile and keep
up-to-date on their buying preferences and needs. If you sell
multiple products, for example, you should know which products your
customers buy, their preferred method of purchase, where they
learned about you and so on. You can facilitate two-way
communication on your Web site and through a customer relationship
management program. In all your customer-service activities,
soliciting customer feedback is essential to building loyalty among
your customer base.
To find out more about marketing to women, read EVEolution: The 8 Truths of Marketing to
Women (Hyperion) by Faith Popcorn and Lys Marigold. For
more details about women entrepreneurs, log on to the Center for
Women's Business Research Web site, found at www.womensbusinessresearch.org.
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Contact marketing expert Kim T. Gordon, author of
Bringing Home the Business, at www.smallbusinessnow.com.
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