The MT Position

Have you met Ed and Ned? They ride your system. In fact they ride every transit system in the world. Sounds like these two guys are the ultimate transit junkies, doesn’t it?

Who are they? Ed is the representation of your everyday rider. Ned is the representation of your not everyday rider. And together they make up your total customer base.

Ed rides everyday or nearly every day as a commuter, student, a committed rider or a true transit dependent. Ned on the other hand rides much less often to go shopping once a week, or goes only to ball games or festivals. Perhaps Ned’s car is being repaired or the car pool is talking the day off.

Actually, there are lots of Ed’s and Ned’s and knowing something about each is helpful. By the way, it is very likely that the Ned’s outnumber the Ed’s. How else would you explain the fact that despite Ned’s riding less frequently, your ridership is about the same each weekday?

That makes your Ned’s pretty important riders. Take a minute and ponder the possibilities. If a Ned rides once a month, then a Ned riding two or three times more is a significant increase in ridership. The point is that you already have a relationship with Ned. You know Ned. Ned knows you. Think of it this way: Your best customer prospects are ones already using your service.

Get to know these riders through surveys and observation. Ask your riders about their riding frequency, the length of time they have been using your system, how they pay their fare, and the reasons they ride (work, shopping, school, etc.). Pretty soon, you’ll have a feel for the proportion of Ned’s to Ed’s.

Let’s say you have 10,000 riders (not trips) each weekday, and your surveys show that 60 percent ride every day. On average the other 40 percent ride 1.25 times a week. Knowing this you can make an educated guess that the ratio of Ned’s to Ed’s is 4 to 1. That would mean that there are 6000 Ed’s and as many as 24,000 Ned’s. Instead of 10,000 generic customers, your base may be as high as 30,000 customers.

Turning a Ned into an Ed takes some effort, but the payoff is huge. Identifying Ned’s and courting them with incentives like university and employer pass programs, service frequency and route improvements, relationship marketing programs and improved customer services are all ways to migrate Ned’s into a higher level of use.

That doesn’t mean that you forget the Ed’s riding your buses, ferries and trains. But doing more to make Ned’s into Ed’s will pay off by making the Ed’s more loyal and committed customers.

Like I said earlier; think of the possibilities.

Keep the thread going by adding or modifying the above principles, or by sharing a story that relates to your experience with Ed’s and Ned’s. Let me hear from you!

Joe Caruso is Senior Consultant for Brecon Hill Consulting. He’s the former marketing director for the Milwaukee County Transit System (WI) and has over 32 years of transit marketing experience. He welcomes your comments at jcaruso@breconhill.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under Transit Talk. 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.