You’ve heard it before: acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining current customers. That’s an age old marketing adage. The costs associated with acquiring a new customer includes raising brand awareness, high incentives to lure them away from other brands and additional costs associated with setting up new accounts, training more sales reps, and acclimating your customer.
Reactivating customer’s builds on the investments you’ve already made and avoids the costs I just mentioned. These customers are aware of your brand, they are more receptive and reengaging them can help gain significant incremental revenue.
So where do you start?
Determine the most receptive candidates.
You only want to send emails to clients or customers who are most likely or ready to respond. You don’t want to send marketing messages to customers who are not ready–otherwise you risk seeming overenthusiastic and that may drive customers away. For this, you’ll want to generate models using data from purchase behavior like last interaction with brand, categories of products a customer has purchased, interaction on different channels, demographic data and more. For a look at other traits take a quick look at our Definitive Guide to Predictive Analytics.
Customize marketing message using past data.
Now that you know which lapsed customers are ready to respond, take a look at their purchase history. What have they responded to in the past? What type of products do they buy? What kind of brands do they like? Craft your messages according to their tastes and needs.
Figure out why the customer lapsed by looking at past trends and use this as an opportunity to address the reason they lapsed. Perhaps, the customer may give you a second chance.
Omnichannel Touch Points
The shopping journey is becoming increasingly omnichannel. We’ve written about how Apple Pay will influence the shopping journey, and how online only or brick-and-mortar only stores are expanding to other channels. There is no reason your marketing message should not be omnichannel as well. After customizing a message using your customer’s past data, try to reach that customers at as many points as possible. A greater number of contacts usually correlates to a higher response rate. So don’t forget to send that email, postcard or app notification with personalized offers.