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Pareto's principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of effort.  You can apply that to business, relationships, jobs, just about everything in life and eBay is no difference.  Pareto's principle, as it applies to business suggests that you should focus the bulk of your marketing efforts on the most profitable 20% of your customers.  If you were an eBay seller that sold a large amount of items in the same niche frequently, you may be able to benefit from this strategy.

How To Get A List Of Your Buyers
Getting a list of your buyers for a period of time can be easy if you are using good auction management software.  eBay's own Selling Manager Pro allows you to download all your customers as a .CSV file which contains their email addresses, eBay username and total price they paid for items.  

This is a screenshot from Marketplace Advisor, which has a reporting tool that enables you to download all your sales for a specified period of time and includes the same information as eBay's Selling Manager Pro report does.   

How To Find The Most Profitable 20%

1. Open your CSV file in Excel then select all your data
2. Scroll down to the bottom to see how many customers you have total.  For this example, I have 620
3. Go to Data -> PivotTable & PivotChart Wizard make sure Microsoft Excel list or database is checked, as well as PivotTable Report, then click Next
4. Click Next again after it asks what data you want to use.  You should have already selected it in step 1. 
5. On the next step, make sure New Worksheet selected, then click Finish.
6. That should bring you to the following screen, after which you need to drag the email/eBay username field into the column that says "Drop Row Fields Here" and the Auction field into the "Drop Data Items Here" section.
   
7. Now the Pivot Table should be showing you an alphabetical list of your buyers along with the total quantity of items they've ordered from you.  Double-click your email/eBay Username field, which brings up the PivotTable field. 
8. Click Advanced
   
9. Now you need to set AutoSort options to "Descending" and "Using Field" to "Count of auction" so that it shows you the customers who've purchased the most number of items first.  Then set Top 10 AutoShow to On and change the number from 10 to whatever 20% of your total number of customers is.  In my case, it's 124.
   
   
   Note: If you have customers at the bottom of your list who have ordered the same number of items, it will display all of them, even if that number is more than you set the Top 10 AutoShow to.  For example, even though I set it to show the top 124 (20%) customers, it actually gave me 221 because there were so many customers that ordered 2 items from me.  In this situation, you'd want to decrease the Top 10 AutoShow number to a smaller number so you have a smaller group of customers that is closer to the 20% we are looking for. 
   
   Pareto's principle can sometimes be closer to 90/10 instead of 80/20.  By the looks of my numbers, changing my Top 10 Autoshow number to 62 (10% instead of 20%), that gives me 76 customers who have ordered 4 or more items which is more along the lines of what we're looking for here. 
10. Now your spreadsheet should look like this:
    

Now you should look these customers up in your records or auction management software to see their ordering history. 

What To Do With The Most Profitable 20%
Now that you know which of your customers buy the most, you should look them up in your records or auction management software to see their ordering history.  Look at the individual products they bought and see if you can find a common theme.  Maybe they buy a certain size, color, artist or genre from you.  See if you can get to know their taste so that when you get a new product that is similar to what they have bought before, you can email them personally and let them know about the new product.  Of course, if you could find a way to automate it Amazon-style, that would be even better and I would love to hear about it.  

Also consider creating a special email filter for these people so that whenever they email you with a problem of question, you make sure to pay extra attention to them.  If you review your top 20% every month, you'll find that adjusting your VIP customer marketing email filter only takes a few minutes because you are only changing a handful of names.