A Customer Conversion Funnel and All You Need To Know About It

Nothing heart breaks a marketer’s heart like seeing subscribers not opening their emails. Increasing numbers of users unsubscribing and falling open rates can be really off-putting.

However, you need to understand that this can be due to several reasons, from unimpressive prices or products to imperfect email copies that do not convert.

Nevertheless, all is not lost, with a robust win-back campaign, you can still re-engage your customers and subscribers. In this post, we’ll dig deeper into the customer win-back campaign and let you know why it is important to your business’s success.

What is a customer win-back campaign?

 A customer win-back campaign is a marketing strategy that is focused on re-engaging lost clients who subscribed to your services or purchased your products but relapsed due to personal reasons.

The primary target of this approach is to get prospects to interact with your email newsletters and call back to your business. It is a great strategy to reduce churn rates and improve retention. Usually, win-back campaigns are available in different shapes and sizes, including;

• The inactive customer wins back; this type of win-back strategy acknowledges the fact that, although a person bought from your brand, they can always go cold. An inactive client shows a disinterest in purchasing but not really a conscious dislike of your business. They are just passive.
• Defecting customer win back: this category of customers has decided they don’t want your marketing emails anymore and are showing signs of leaving your brand. It is not easy to lose hard to get clients, but these customer segments actively decide to stop any interaction with your brand.

An effective customer win-back strategy improves your customer lifetime value and revenue to your business. And although it can be hard to run the best approach to win back relapsed customers, it is worth trying and cheaper than acquiring new clients.

It is imperative to build strong win-back efforts for lost customers who have high lifetime value with substantial contributions to the business. These types of clients include those who;

• Have recommended your brand to others.
• Had complaints that were poorly addressed or not resolved.
• Left because of price-related issues rather than service quality.

Is a customer win-back campaign worth it?

According to a study by Marketing Metrics, marketers have a 20-40% chance of re-engaging back lost customers than 5-20% of converting a prospect to a new client. While not all relapsed customers are worth your win-back efforts, some might be more important to your brand than cold prospects.

Based on different marketing research, businesses that have better customer re-engagement strategies have a doubled customer lifetime value, 32X more ROI, and improved revenues.

Furthermore, businesses have a high chance of winning back lost clients for various reasons. First, relapsed customers are already conversant with what you offer; hence no need to do brand awareness. Secondly, they have shown the need for your offerings, meaning that it is easier to re-engage them than cold prospects.

And finally, technological advancements, like customer database and CRM, have made it easier to refer to the previous customers’ interaction history with your company and design personalized emails and win back provisions for those who relapsed.

Key customer win-back strategies that work

While building effective customer re-engagement strategies might not be easy, there are several true and tested approaches you can put in place. See these ways in the following see;

1. Find out their reasons for leaving

Finding out why your relapsed clients stopped buying from your business is the most important step, to begin with. Figuring this out will help you design the right action plan and see whether each customer should be re-engaged.

You can easily do this by collecting customer feedback by running customer loss surveys. You can include the following questions in your surveys;

• What motivated you to become our customer?
• What did you like the most about our brand?
• What are your reasons for leaving our brand?
• Which competitor did you go to?
• What made you choose the specific competitor?
• What should we do to get you back to our business?

Even if a specific client is not worth getting back, running these surveys can give you great insights into where you failed to meet customers’ expectations and all you need to do to retain the existing ones.

For instance, if you discover that most of your lost clients left because your products did not have essential features for your target audience, then you might want to look deeper into your product roadmap.

2. Identify those who have high chance of returning

Working hard to win every lost customer might result in a waste of time, human resources, and marketing budget. Instead, you need to be selective and pick only customers who are likely to get back based on the data collected from the customer loss survey and previous behaviors.

The category of customers who are likely to return include;

• Those who referred others to your brand.
• Those who left without filing complaints.
• Those who had issues and were solved satisfactorily.
• Those who left due to high prices instead of poor service quality.

3. Approach lost customers with returning potential with the right offers.

After identifying and segmenting lost customers with returning potential, find out how you can approach them rightly with the help of sales and marketing automation tools. At this stage, providing a one-size-fits-all incentive is not advisable.

Instead, you need to tailor the customer win-back campaign depending on the reasons for leaving your brand. In a nutshell, customize your win-back email campaigns to fit each customer category.

4. Employ personalization techniques

Personalization continues to be one of the top priorities of global consumers and business leaders across the world, and 2023 is not exempted.

According to a recent study by Emersys data, close to two-thirds of customers remain loyal and are likely to purchase more from a business because of the influence of personalized engagements. It can also go a long way to getting back lost consumers.

For instance, those who left due to poor experience with the support team may be reactivated through highly personalized incentives. If the reason was dissatisfaction with your products and services, you could reach out to them with information on improved offerings.

5. Contact your customers before they leave

The most cost-effective and efficient way of preventing customers from churning is to stop them from going in the first place.

Apart from contacting your former customers and subscribers after they leave, you should identify those who are at high risk of going and reach out proactively using a win-back campaign that suits their preferences.

You can find them by analyzing those who have taken a long to open your emails or log into their business accounts. After this, you can create a series of re-engagement emails reminding them of the positive experience they are missing on.

6. Use precise and engaging subject lines

Use precise and straightforward customer win-back email marketing subject lines, such as;

• First name- we want you back on our business.
• Where have you been? And insert their names.
• Come back to us. (company name).
• We miss you.
• It’s been a while.
• Did you forget about your business account? Insert the company name.

7. Leverage email and push notifications

Push notifications and emails have been confirmed as some of the best customers re-engagement strategies by leading business owners and global consumers. However, you need to be careful with the type of content you use.

Customizing messages to target a particular customer category can go a long way to show customers that you remember them and want them to be back.

Additionally, it is also easy for marketers to enable these notifications to contain content from your previous interactions. They would have a high chance of buying from you if they get a really nice deal or unique discount tailored to their liking.

Being generous once in a while to win back an important lost client would not hurt the business as letting them go forever.

Conclusion

It hurts when your hard-won clients stop interacting with your business and get into the churned customers category. Luckily, a well-executed customer win-back campaign can help re-engage them and get them to start purchasing from your brand again.

Relapsed customers have a greater value to your brand than the cold prospects because they are already familiar with your business and are cheaper and easier to sell to. However, just like cold prospects, not all of them are worth winning since trying to win everyone might waste your time, money, and even manpower.

This is why it is advisable to identify and refocus your business re-engagement strategies on customers whose prior behavior shows they are likely to return. Once this is done, you can go ahead and apply the win-back approaches discussed in the post.