Recapture Inactive Customers

Image: Reengaging Customers

A lot of focus in business goes to capturing new customers, but what about previous customers who you already know like your product. It’s common for companies to abandon previous customers when they stop buying or responding. But according to invesp it costs five times as much to attract a new customer, then to keep an existing one.

Recapturing inactive customers isn’t as hard as it would seem. Especially since your chances of selling to previous customers is much higher than capturing new ones.

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With recapturing being cheaper and having a higher success rate, it’s a no brainer that you should be targeting this market. Below you’ll learn some tips and tricks on how you can recapture your inactive customers.

Email Retargeting

What is it? A high-return marketing channel that tailors marketing messages to people who have either shown interest or previously purchased something from you online. Browser cookies keep track of individual visitor’s activity on your site, working to retarget those customers.

After finding and installing the best retargeting software, you’ll upload your inactive users into their own email list to start a campaign just for them. The program will then place ads across the webpages and/or social media sites your inactive customers visit.

You will also want to send emails tailored to inactive customer’s specific needs. Split these customers into categories based on similarities and retarget each group in ways specific to them. Abandoned carts and searches, products viewed, and ones they spent the longest looking at, are a great way to narrow down an email. These methods are more likely to capture the inactive customer’s attention.

As always, take time to go over the data and figure out what emails are getting inactive customer’s attention. Adjust your campaign and always continue to improve it.

Get Personal

Follow-ups are important in keeping your customers active and reenacting inactive customers. After customers make a purchase, follow up with personalized messages that reflect their desires and adds value to their experience. Send a thank you message, highlight uses for the product, suggest items that would go well with the product, etc. to add value while you try to plant yourself in their life.

Use the data you already have on your inactive customers to send them targeted messages. Remind customers of why they chose to buy or visit your site in the first place. Send them suggestions of the products they could repurchase or try for the first time with a discounted offer.

Using geo-targeting you can send specific messages to inactive customers when they are in a specific city, close to the store, on a certain IP address or device ID, through GPS signals, geo-fencing, and more. This strategy will help you deliver the right message at the right time. The location data also helps to define the who and what of your audience. This proves to be effective when targeting consumers who have purchased in the past.

Use customer’s names when sending them messages. The more personalized the message, the higher chances of a customer, past or present, opening and clicking through.

Deep-Linking

You always want to make sure you make it as easy as possible for a customer to take a desired action, especially when wanting a customer to reengage. Deep links are used to send users straight to specific in-app locations. This strategy saves users time and energy from locating a particular page themselves – significantly improving user experience.

Deep links provide a seamless user journey and increase the likelihood of an install and purchase. Creating campaigns using deep linking provides a better user experience, moving them onto your purchasing page in a single click. It drives inactive customers right where you want them to be.

With unresponsive customers, it’s even more important to remove all the obstacles and lead them directly to completing a purchase.

Direct Mail

As digital marketing seems to be the future, direct mail is still here to stay. Direct mail response rates outperform digital channels by a long shot, achieving a 4.7% response rate as compared to a 0.62% response rate for all digital channels combined.

Using targeting and segmentation send unresponsive customers something different. Receiving a gift in the mail is sure to spark inactive customer’s attention. This leads to not only gaining your past customers back but also building up better brand loyalty.

Spark Your Audience Engagement

Audience Engagement

All top companies have extensive customer engagement, and most notably, it’s largely customer-driven. Every company strives to have audience engagement. It helps build relationships, community, and loyalty, encourages conversation and participation, and makes your brand stand out among others.

Companies need a long-term engagement strategy as it is vital to their growth. Better customer experience means customers will not only choose your brand over any other they are also willing to pay more for your product or service. The better the experience the more loyal a customer will become and the more engaged they’ll get.

Humanize your brand

As a company you want to be able to play to people’s needs and be someone customers can relate to. Popular consumer brands such as Wendy’s and Under Armor have it easier while brands like banks and B2B companies have to try even harder. Utilizing people within your company that are passionate about your brand, you can work to create a humanized brand. Create content that is relatable, things consumers would interact with, and make your brand stand out as something they want to be a part of.

Consistent communication

Your engaged customers want to hear from you. They want to know they can count on you to inform them of updates to your product/service and company, especially in these unusual times. In gaining audience engagement, you also want them to count on you for supplying them with information within your industry. In gaining engagement, you must be consistent in your newsletters, social media posts, emails, and any other form of communication you use.

Get to know your community

The more you know the easier it is to interact with your audience. Do your research as to why your audience is drawn towards you. Take time to get to know them so you can engage accordingly. Know their interests, wants, needs, and lifestyles. Knowing your audience drives you in the right direction, making sure you don’t strike out when trying to engage. Asking for feedback will also help you get to know your community and gives you ideas of what your audience thinks currently and what they want to see in the future. Most customers are very willing to give their opinions and thus become engaged with your product and brand. You’ll also see engagement levels rise once you start implementing their ideas.

Surprise personalized outreach

Digital marketing allows companies to take personalized engagement even further. The most effective content strategy is to offer something that they wouldn’t expect. Real-time personalized deals are a sure way to get customers to engage with your brand. Making your deals relevant to customers right when they need it makes them feel as though the advertisements were made for them. Be sure to create marketing and advertising campaigns based on location, social platform, and specific products to boost your consumer engagement strategy. However, personalization should be about making the user feel welcomed and known without feeling like you’re digging into their personal data.

Schedule weekly activities

It can be effective to post activities or ask questions the same day each week on social media – promoting things like Sales Tip Tuesdays or Motivational Mondays. After posting your content, ask your followers to join in, sharing their tips and advice, or posting a photo of what motivated them. This encourages followers to not only engage with your post but others in the community as well. Being the source of community engagement ups your brand and encourages users to return to your page to interact each week, growing your engagement.