To combat customer churn, it’s essential to understand the reasons for churn, focus efforts on the most valuable customers, and reward loyalty.
In this article, I present 10 effective customer win-back strategies for your inactive or lost customers.
Sommaire
#1 Understanding why customers churn
There are many reasons why a customer might cancel their subscription to your service or stop making purchases.
Quite often, it’s because the products are too expensive, they’ve had a bad customer experience, or they find the purchased product too hard to understand.
#2 Choose your best “losts
To avoid losing too many customers, I advise you to focus your marketing efforts on some rather than others. Find out, for example, whether your customers match the criteria you’ve set yourself, and if you find that some of them aren’t likely to contribute much to your MRR, focus on other customers. There’s no point wasting your time (and money) on customers who may not stay for long!
If you want to embark on a win-back strategy, make sure you analyze the data you have on your customers’ behavior, and which variables are most important. This will enable you to identify patterns of behavior, build a solid strategy and develop good customer relationships.
My advice
To identify at-risk customers, a customer success tool can be a great help.
#3 Personalize your win-back strategy
Once you’ve identified the customers you want to win back, make sure you personalize your win-back strategy and offer products that meet their needs.
For example, you can show them the value you brought them when they were still your customers, reminding them what your products enabled them to do, and how long your relationship lasted.
Don’t hesitate to send them highly targeted promotions or re-engagement offers, introduce them to new product features or sponsor a competition. It’s a little help that can tip the scales in your favor!
#4 Automate your win-back campaigns
Once you’ve defined your strategy, don’t hesitate to automate your win-back campaigns. Your customers will automatically receive their rewards at the right time, and above all, you’ll save a lot of time by avoiding manual follow-up!
When automating, you can define the delivery time and the type of reward to be sent, or even customize the reward notification email.
Above all, as soon as you propose new offers, get back in touch with your former customers!
#5 Set a budget for each campaign
Before launching campaigns, make sure you understand the profitability of your actions. The first step is to study your segments. You must try to predict how long a returning consumer will stay with you.
Quite often, we observe that returning customers stay longer the second time around, and this is especially true of customers who had left because of the price.
So you need to understand which types of offer attract the most customers, of course, but also the costs and returns of each, and assess the relationship between cost and return on investment if you want to maximize your profits.
#6 Prioritize the onboarding of new customers
Once you’ve succeeded in bringing back your former customers, you need to focus on onboarding them. It’s easy to see that there’s a direct correlation between customer welcome and customer loyalty, and customers attach a great deal of importance to it!
So make sure you offer them a positive experience that exceeds their expectations, and help them discover your product in its entirety. Above all, show them what makes your solution so valuable, and what sets it apart from the competition!
#7 Analyze customer behavior
Make sure you constantly analyze your customers’ behavior. This is essential to adapt your strategy and reactivate the customer if necessary.
You can do this by asking them targeted questions about a product, for example, or soliciting their opinion on a particular product. This is very useful for getting to know your customers’ expectations and reducing churn.
#8 Rewarding customer loyalty
Throughout your win-back strategy, keep in mind that you’ve brought your customer back thanks to all the efforts you’ve made beforehand. Keep going in this direction, and don’t hesitate to cultivate and nurture their loyalty throughout their lives.
You can show them you’re grateful they’re back by sending them a birthday message and an exclusive offer, for example. You can even reward your former customers’ loyalty by sending them a congratulatory e-mail on the anniversary of their first purchase, with a product promotion for example.
Above all, keep in mind that it costs six times more to acquire a new customer than to retain and reinvigorate an old one! So any effort you make to offer your existing customers that little bit extra will always be worthwhile.
#9 Know when to stop
According to a Marketing Land study, only 12% of e-mails sent as part of a win-back campaign are opened. So whatever strategy you adopt for your win-back campaign, the most important thing is to know when to stop.
Depending on the length of time the customer has been inactive, I’d say two or three well-crafted messages tailored to their particular situation are sufficient. Beyond that, you risk ending up in his spam folder.
#10 Measuring the performance of win-back campaigns
Tracking the results of your win-back campaigns is essential to know whether you’re putting your efforts to good use. There are a number of tools available to find out which customers have been won back thanks to your efforts, and above all how much they have spent with you since their return.
The success of a win-back campaign is measured above all by the length of their period of activity. As a first step, you can try to measure the reactivation rate following the launch of your campaign, in the same way as when you track the conversion of your prospects.
Then you can also look to experiment with new variables in your win-back strategy, such as the value of your rewards or the text of your reward notification emails, for example.
