Reach — growing vs. re-selling the same people
In plain English
There are only two ways to sell more: more people buy from you, or the same people buy more often.
Almost every shop over-invests in the second and under-invests in the first. It's understandable — your existing customers are reachable, cheap to email, and they respond. New customers are expensive and ignore you.
But the research on this is unusually clear. Across thousands of brands and decades of data, the brands that grow do it mainly by reaching more people. Loyalty programmes and discounting to your existing base produce much less growth than the effort suggests.
This screen shows you three things:
- Penetration — how much of your business is new customers versus repeat. If almost all your revenue comes from people who've bought before, you're not growing, you're harvesting.
- Distinctive assets — could someone recognise your brand with the name covered up? Colours, packaging, a logo shape, a character. Sharp's research says this is what makes advertising stick.
- Category Entry Points — the moments when someone might want what you sell. "Running out of coffee on a Sunday." "Needing a last-minute gift." If your brand comes to mind in those moments, you win; if it doesn't, you're invisible even to people who like you.
How to use it
- Click "Growth Science" in the left-hand menu, then "Reach."
- Look at your new-vs-repeat split first. If new customers are a small minority, that's your growth problem.
- Check your distinctive assets score. It's based on what's in your brand kit — logo, colours, fonts, packaging.
- Scroll to Category Entry Points. If it's empty, click "Suggest" to get a starting list.
- Add the buying moments that matter for your products. Aim for 6–10.
- Look at each one's coverage score — that's how well your current products and content actually address it.
- Work on the low-coverage entry points with content, product pages, or collections.
⏱ ~20 min to set up · 💳 Pro+ · 🎯 Grow by reaching more people, not by squeezing the same ones
Why this matters for your business
Most shops have a loyalty programme and no plan for being remembered. That ordering is backwards for almost everyone.
The reason is simple arithmetic. Your existing customers are a fixed, small pool. You can get them to buy slightly more often, and that's worth doing, but the ceiling is low. Everyone who could buy from you and doesn't yet is a vastly bigger pool, and you reach almost none of them.
The barrier to reaching them usually isn't advertising budget. It's memory. When someone's in a buying moment — they've run out, something broke, a birthday is coming — a handful of brands come to mind. Those are the ones that get considered. Everyone else isn't rejected; they're never thought of at all.
Category Entry Points are how you attack that. You list the moments that should trigger your brand, then make sure your products, pages, and content actually connect to those moments. It sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it, which is why most shops are findable only by people already looking for them by name.
The distinctive-assets score is the other half. If your advertising looks like everyone else's, people remember the category and forget you specifically — which means your ad spend partly benefits your competitors.
What this typically unlocks
| What you get | Typical result |
|---|---|
| Knowing whether you're growing or harvesting | Immediately — one number |
| Buying moments you're invisible for | Usually several you'd never listed |
| Content strategy | Driven by demand moments, not keyword guesswork |
| Brand recognition gaps | Scored, not guessed |
| Balance between acquisition and loyalty | Made explicit |
What you actually get
1. Penetration — new vs. repeat
A straight split of your recent buyers into first-time and returning, over a 90-day window.
How to read it:
| Pattern | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly new buyers | Growing, but retention may be weak | Check the Journey Ascend stage |
| Healthy mix | The usual healthy state | Keep both running |
| Mostly repeat buyers | Harvesting, not growing | Acquisition is your constraint |
The last case is the dangerous one, because revenue can look fine for a long time while your customer base slowly shrinks. Each quarter you sell to a slightly smaller group slightly harder.
2. Distinctive assets
A readiness score built from what's in your brand kit:
| Asset | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Logo | The baseline |
| Colours | The fastest-recognised asset in most categories |
| Typography | Consistency across every touchpoint |
| Packaging | The one your customer physically holds |
| Imagery style | Makes your ads recognisable while scrolling |
The test to keep in mind: cover your brand name. Could someone still tell it's you? If not, your advertising is building the category rather than your brand.
3. Category Entry Points
The buying moments that should make someone think of you. Each one has a cue type:
| Cue type | Example |
|---|---|
| Occasion | "Last-minute birthday gift" |
| Need | "Ran out mid-week" |
| Emotion | "Want to feel treated after a hard week" |
| Location | "Setting up a new flat" |
| Time | "Sunday evening meal prep" |
| Companion | "Something to bring to a dinner party" |
Each entry point gets a coverage score — how well your current catalogue and content actually address it, checked against your real products.
Low coverage on an important entry point is your best content opportunity. It means demand exists, the moment happens, and you have nothing that meets it.
Coverage is recalculated as your catalogue changes, so it stays current rather than reflecting the day you wrote it.
A note on the tension with loyalty
This tool argues that reach beats loyalty for growth. The app also ships a full loyalty programme. That isn't a contradiction.
Loyalty work is genuinely valuable — it improves margins, lifts repeat rate, and makes marketing cheaper. What the research challenges is the belief that loyalty is the main engine of growth. It usually isn't.
The practical answer: run both, but if your penetration number says you're harvesting, fix reach first.
How it works (without the technical bits)
Real merchant scenarios
Scenario A — Revenue flat, base shrinking
Setup. Specialist tea retailer, revenue flat for two years. Assumed the market had matured.
Penetration over 90 days:
| Share of buyers | |
|---|---|
| New customers | 11% |
| Returning customers | 89% |
What that meant. They were selling more to fewer people. Each year the base shrank a little through natural attrition, and each year they compensated by selling harder to who was left. Revenue held; the business quietly contracted.
Action. Shifted budget from loyalty emails into reach — Category Entry Points work plus broader top-of-funnel content.
Result after four quarters:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| New-customer share | 11% | 34% |
| Revenue | flat | +29% |
| Total customers | shrinking | +41% |
The flat revenue had been hiding a contracting business.
Scenario B — Entry points nobody had listed
Setup. Homeware brand, strong on "gifts" and nothing else.
Suggested entry points, with coverage scores:
| Entry point | Cue | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Last-minute gift | Occasion | 82% |
| Moving into a first flat | Location | 14% |
| Housewarming present | Occasion | 31% |
| Replacing something that broke | Need | 9% |
| Making a rented place feel like home | Emotion | 6% |
"Making a rented place feel like home" at 6% was the revelation. It was arguably their single best-fit moment — affordable, non-permanent, style-led homeware — and they had nothing addressing it. No collection, no content, no landing page.
Action. Built a "renting" collection, four guides, and a landing page around that moment.
Result within six months: that cluster became 18% of new customer acquisition, at roughly half their usual cost per customer — because they were the only obvious answer to a question plenty of people were asking.
Scenario C — Ads that built the category
Setup. Supplements brand spending £40k/month on social ads. Distinctive assets score: 22.
The problem. Their ads were clean white backgrounds, sans-serif type, a product shot. Indistinguishable from six competitors running near-identical creative.
The test. Showed customers their ad with the brand name removed. Only 9% could identify it. Three named a competitor.
Action. Built genuine distinctive assets — a specific deep green, a hand-drawn illustration style, consistent packaging across every ad.
Result after two quarters:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Brand recognition (name covered) | 9% | 47% |
| Branded search volume | baseline | +180% |
| Cost per customer | £52 | £34 |
The ad spend hadn't changed. It was just finally being credited to them instead of to the category.
Scenario D — Correctly deciding not to act
Setup. Merchant saw 78% repeat buyers and prepared a major acquisition push.
Before spending, they checked the context. They sold professional-grade equipment to a small, well-defined trade audience — perhaps 4,000 potential buyers in their market, and they already had 2,900 of them.
High repeat share was correct for their business. There wasn't a large untapped pool; they'd already reached most of it.
Action. Cancelled the acquisition push. Invested in range extension instead — more products for the customers they already had.
Result: average order value up 38% over the year.
The lesson. "Grow by reaching more people" assumes more people exist. Check that first.
Best practices
✅ Check penetration before planning any growth work. It tells you whether the constraint is reach or retention.
✅ List 6–10 Category Entry Points. Fewer misses opportunity; many more gets unfocused.
✅ Prioritise low-coverage entry points that fit your products. That's demand you're currently invisible for.
✅ Do the name-covered test on your own ads. It's uncomfortable and it's the fastest way to see the problem.
✅ Keep entry points in customers' language, not your categories. "Sunday meal prep," not "food storage."
✅ Re-check coverage after catalogue changes. New products change what you cover.
❌ Don't abandon loyalty work. Run both — this is about balance, not replacement.
❌ Don't chase reach if your market is genuinely small. Scenario D.
❌ Don't confuse a logo with distinctive assets. Assets are everything recognisable without the name.
❌ Don't list entry points you can't serve. Coverage will correctly stay low and it just adds noise.
Plan tiers
| Capability | Free | Starter | Pro | Agency | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Penetration (new vs. repeat) | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Distinctive assets score | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Category Entry Points | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Live coverage scoring | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI entry-point suggestions | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-store comparison | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Frequently asked
What's a healthy new-customer share? It depends on your market size and how long you've been trading. A growing store usually shows a substantial minority of buyers being new. Under about 15% is worth investigating unless your market is genuinely small.
Isn't loyalty important? Yes — for margin, for repeat rate, and for cheaper marketing. The research challenges loyalty as the main growth engine, not its value overall.
How many entry points should I have? Six to ten active ones. Enough to cover your real buying moments, few enough to actually serve.
What does the coverage score check? Your entry point's keywords against your actual catalogue and content. Low coverage means you have little that addresses that moment.
Where do suggested entry points come from? Your catalogue and category. Treat them as a starting list to edit — you know your customers' moments better than any suggestion.
How do I improve distinctive assets? Complete your brand kit, then use those assets consistently everywhere. Consistency matters more than cleverness.
Does this replace SEO keyword work? No, they complement each other. Entry points are buying moments; keywords are the searches those moments produce. Start with the moment, then find its keywords in keyword portfolio.
My repeat share is very high and my market is small. Is that bad? No — see Scenario D. Check whether a larger pool actually exists before treating it as a problem.
See also
- Growth Science overview — all eight tools
- Journey — the Aware stage, and its limits
- Positioning — what you want remembered for
- Jobs — the language your entry points should use
- Loyalty overview — the other half of the balance
- Keyword portfolio — turning moments into searches
- Customer intelligence — cohort view of the same question
- Brand voice & personas — brand consistency