Customer acquisition is something every organization strives for. But do we give enough importance to customers whom we have already served or those who showed interest in our offerings in the past? The answer may vary from company to company, but facts state that around 30-60 percent of customers become dormant over a period of time. Your clients may go silent for many reasons. However, the lack of customer engagement and repeat value in your product offering could be two of the prime reasons.
Ignoring dormant customers is a bad idea. Marketers are well aware that it costs about six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to engage with the existing ones. Re-engaging with your old customers will not only open up new business opportunities for you but also send out a positive message to customers that you care.
An email can be a great way to start with. A Forrester report mentions that email and direct traffic are the two most significant touch-points for frequent customers. The report states that 30 percent of transactions by repeat customers start with an email from the retailer and an additional 30 percent type the retailer’s URL directly into a browser. Research by Strongview states that only 17 percent of email marketers’ prioritize “re-engaging inactive subscribers” in 2016.
A marketer usually has a list of about 20 to 50 percent of customers classified as ‘inactive.’ These inactive customers can be a great source of growth for marketers. Here are few tips to reawaken your dormant customers and proactively engage with them to open up gateways for future communication:
Update Your Customer Database
If it’s quite a while you have not got in touch with your inactive customers, there are high chances that many of them may have had some changes in their contact information. With an outdated database, there is no way you can run your re-activation campaign successfully. Poor data management can hamper your re-engagement efforts and lead to poor targeting, low response rate, and eventually a lower conversion rate. Sending out emails to wrong addresses cannot be a practical marketing strategy.
It is also imperative for marketers to update their old databases by cross-checking information with various social media sites or by opting for a data appending service to remove discrepancies from data and make it up-to-date.
Find Out Why Your Customers Went Silent
From the lack of customer engagement to lack of product need to poor product or service experience in the past, there could be umpteen reasons why some clients choose not to interact with a brand. Before you begin with your email campaign, it would be logical to do an analysis of all these reasons and then design the best possible email strategy to win back your customers.
You may go through customers’ past activities, transaction histories, and interactions, and also engage in various kinds of surveys to understand their experiences with your brand and what change in the approach would they like to see.
Adam Boyden writes, “Ask customers what you could do better, how you could adjust your offerings, how you might better meet their needs, etc. Take the feedback seriously and make adjustments where possible. Then, let them know that their feedback was heard and implemented. You might be surprised by how much goodwill this generates, and how the goodwill will bring them back.”
Design Engaging Email Templates
Remember! You have to woo customers who may have different reasons for not engaging with you. Your email must standout to grab their eyeballs. Marketers can create attractive and engaging email templates to target each separate customer segment instead of creating a generalized template.
The content in the email should clearly demonstrate your intent and not annoy customers who are not prepared to receive messages from you. From the subject line to the body of the message to call to action buttons, design each part carefully and make sure it doesn’t fail to catch readers’ attention.
Expand Your Scope of Communication
While an email can help you restart conversations with your customers, its primary purpose would be to open up new channels of communication with them. An email should provide readers with subscriber options so that they don’t miss out on the important news and updates from your brand. You may also compliment your email campaigns using social media. Connecting with customers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other online platforms help marketers gain significant insights on customers’ preferences and their current professional and social status.
Offer Attractive Incentives
Words may not be enough for many customers. A marketer may offer various discounts, cash incentives, re-activation bonuses, freebies and gift cards to give customers more reasons to re-connect with your brand. Your offers must be of value to them and must be unique in comparison to what is usually offered by most of your competitors. For example, you may offer exciting discounts on your most popular products or give them free consultation or service for a particular period. At the end of the day, it’s more important to retain your customers even if it puts a small hole in your pocket.
Be Proactive and Follow Up
All your reactivation efforts may go in vain if you don’t follow up on your email campaigns. Develop channels, platforms, and content through which your brand is more accessible to your customers, and they can communicate with you with ease. Share articles, blogs, audio-visuals, whitepapers, and more to educate them on a constant basis and make sure your brand is rightly positioned in their minds. You may also compliment your email campaigns using the mobile channel by using push notifications and in-app messaging to drive re-engagement.
Marketers must remember that they should not try to besiege customers to start re-interacting with their brands. Bombarding customers with unnecessary content may kill your chances of winning them back and negatively affect your brand reputation. This is why, when it comes to customer engagement, slow and steady always wins the race.
Read more about marketing tips and tricks here on Tech.Co