It happens very often within any type of business that marketing and sales focus solely on acquiring new customers, often not paying proper attention to retaining existing customers. Focusing on recovering customers, or registered users, who have not interacted with us for several months is a particularly interesting activity for three reasons:
- enables us to increase Customer Lifetime Value
- Is an activity with an extremely limited cost
- can be easily automated, thus requiring no special organizational efforts
Users at risk: who are they?
The at-risk user segment consists of those who for an extended period of time-which will obviously differ depending on our type of business-don’t interact with our site or our commercial communications.
Thus, users at risk are those who have purchased from us in the past or have simply registered on our site and then become inactive. These are people who have already shown interest in our products or services and are therefore very likely to buy from us.
We will therefore have to work first of all to measure what the relevance of this segment is and to be able to reduce the number as much as possible. Recovering these customers is often not difficult but requires prompt action, or else these users will move over time to even less active segments, until they are considered lost.
How do I identify them?
Tracking at-risk users is very simple in theory, as long as you have the right tools in place. In order to identify them, it is critical to be able to have an advanced marketing automation system that can recognize our users and can track all of their actions, so that we can actually automatically recognize these users and their actions over time.
What is very important is the fact that, the platform chosen, automatically and punctually checks for new users who have become at risk during the day and thus be able to automate the flow of communications that aim to re-engage them.If in fact this activity is done once, we will not be able to optimize its yield and it will become one of the many repetitive tasks performed and by our marketing, with reduced to zero added value.
How do I re-engineer them?
Re-engaging at-risk users is not particularly complicated–it just requires a few good ideas! A normal flow of recovery might involve a series of communications using the different channels available to us, for example:
- SMS
- Campagna Social
- Web Push Notification
We will then go on to create communication templates that incentivize users to return to visit our site. These communications will be customized to the individual user so as to increase their relevance and effectiveness. An important step will then be recognizing them when they actually come back to the site and showing them, for example, the coupons we have reserved for them, customizing the various pages taking into account their past tastes and suggesting some new things-perhaps based on interests or purchases made in the past-.It is then a matter of imagining complete reengagement experiences that take into account all the various channels available to them. Once this experience is designed, it will be our automation platform that will take care of personalizing each communication and automating its delivery whenever a user becomes at risk.
Some examples
Let’s look together at a couple of examples of emails that would allow us to retrieve this type of user. Always remember that in addition to suggested products, we could also tickle our customer’s curiosity with content that is particularly relevant to them. In case our site sells products from the recurring purchase we could base the recommendation algorithms on the products most purchased in the past by the individual user.
If, on the other hand, we are not dealing with consumer products, we could focus, for example, on what is new in relation to brands or categories purchased last time.
Conclusions
It is, as we have seen, a strategy that is as simple as it is effective in recovering, quickly and consistently over time, a number of users that we would risk losing and may have to “buy back” through traditional acquisition channels in the future.
