Going, Going…Gone? Five Tips To Win Back Lapsed Customers
By Jordan Elkind, Customer Advocate, Custora
You know those customers.
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The ones who placed a few big orders back in 2010 and haven’t returned since. Or the ones who had a hot and heavy love affair with your brand — only to burn out and never come back (or open another one of your emails) again.
The imagery typically used to describe these customers sound like the catalog of a Halloween costume shop. Ghosts. Zombies. The walking dead. But at their heart, all these metaphors relate to one core issue: Customers who used to be great seem to have vanished without a trace.
What’s a marketer to do about these folks? Shower them with rich incentives and exclusive offers? Or acknowledge that they’re gone forever, and stop throwing marketing dollars their way?
Lapsed customers represent a huge opportunity for retailers, but many marketers don’t have effective strategies in place to manage their at-risk shoppers. Here are some tips on how to win these shoppers back for the long run:
1. Figure out who is “sleeping.” Many retailers apply rules to identify customers who are “at risk.” For example, a customer who goes 90 days without a purchase might receive an auto-triggered win-back email. The problem is that customers can vary widely in their “normal” purchase behavior. For someone who typically buys once every six months, going 90 days without a purchase is not at all unusual. So it might be premature to stimulate a return visit with a discount. On the other hand, a customer who typically shops once a week is probably long gone by the 90-day mark. In order to make sure you’re targeting the right folks in the first place, you need to figure out who’s actually lapsed — and who’s just “sleeping” between purchases — by taking your customers’ baseline purchase history into account.
2. Try new tactics. While it’s possible that your lapsed customers have simply forgotten about you, it is more likely that they have disengaged for a reason. Perhaps they lost interest in your product offering altogether. Maybe they had a negative customer service experience, or maybe they just decided to leave you for a competitor. Whatever the case, “business as usual” messaging and creative is less likely to be effective with these customers. Why not try sending your emails at a different time of day, experimenting with a bold new subject line, or going with a different email style altogether? In fact, you may even consider cutting through the clutter of email altogether and reaching out to your highest-value lapsed customers offline. A direct mail campaign, even a phone call from a personal shopper offering a sneak peak of the newest collection, could help re-engage those lapsed shoppers.
3. Get personal. For customers who already have begun to tune you out, “batch and blast” emails can be the final nail in the coffin. It is important to leverage all the rich data you have on your customers to speak to them in a way that is personal and relevant. For example, you might consider using a customer’s purchase history to make customized product recommendations or let her know about a sale on her favorite brand. Or, you may use what you know about a customer’s geographic location to draw attention to season-appropriate merchandise. Whatever the case, make sure that you’re not giving lapsed customers any more excuses to send your emails straight to the trash.
4. It’s not all about the money. Steep discounts are by no means the only — or the most cost-effective — way to re-engage lapsed customers. Non-financial goodies can often do just as good of a job in sparking a fading romance with a brand. Maybe it is offering high-value lapsed customers VIP status, granting them early access to new collections, offering priority shipping, or volunteering a personal shopper to chat with them online. Maybe it’s an invitation to weigh in on a new product. For customers who have already demonstrated that they have (or had) a relationship with your brand, experiential or status-related benefits can be a powerful tool in win-back campaigns.
5. Test everything. The only way you’ll be able to know which of your tactics are working is to test your ideas. These strategies include: mixing up email creative and offers, personalizing product recommendations, and reaching out to lapsed customers offline. Make sure you set aside a control group that won’t receive the treatment in question so that you can quantify the lift of each of your ideas. And most importantly, keep testing. Once you find an idea that works, see if you can identify tactics that connect with your lapsed customers even more effectively.
Lapsed customers can be a tremendous opportunity for retailers. By figuring out who your truly at-risk shoppers are — and reminding them why they fell in love with you in the first place — you can rekindle the romance before it’s too late.
Jordan Elkind is responsible for client success at Custora, a predictive marketing analytics platform for online retailers based in New York City. Prior to Custora, Jordan earned an MBA from Wharton and worked in marketing analytics at Citi Cards.
