Provide for a Range of Confidence Levels

If your market research zeros in on the data, averaging out the numbers for your core female customers, you might miss the vast differences in your consumers' confidence levels. Be careful that you identify and develop a plan for serving all groups of customers on your industry-confidence spectrum. One group of your prospective female customers, for example, might be fluent in your industry's language and comfortable with the transactions involved; while another group might be just beginning to grasp the basics and feel a bit intimidated.

If you skew toward serving those at the confident end of the spectrum, you won't resonate with your tentative consumers. And, if you skew toward the tentative customers, you'll frustrate those who are much more familiar with your industry and know exactly what they want to do and how they want to purchase your product. Sounds like you can't win for losing, but never fear.

The best way to honor any particular customer's time and knowledge is to customize your delivery at several levels. When you do this, you can both carefully draw industry newcomers through the process, and still provide advanced materials and offers that your more industry-familiar women can utilize and benefit from.

If yours is an industry to which some groups of women will be new customers, you might plan to develop several confidence-building "touch points" to better serve them along the way. This might mean something as basic as the option of speaking with a human being, twenty-four hours a day if need be, to help them use the technology of your online store; or it might mean doing a follow-up phone call after an in-person meeting at your bank to make sure all of her questions about your product were fully answered . By incorporating human interaction and communication between your employees and your customers into the daily mix of your business, you can more easily take the pulse of your targeted market subsegments, while monitoring your customers' learning processes as a whole. Then, you can be more responsive to your customers' changing needs and expectations, regularly tweaking your sales and marketing process in real time.

No matter what, women of all confidence levels will appreciate the options you provide to help them learn more about your product or industry, or so they can just shop with ease on your Web site.