In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, brands have to balance between retaining customers and acquiring new ones to continue growth in both business and customer base. In fact, what hurts brands most is losing existing customers instead of vying for new ones. As per one study, it can cost 5x more to acquire a new customer than to retain existing ones. By focusing efforts in increasing retention by 5% could boost profits by 25% to 95%, as noted in a Bain & Company study.
Know why your customers are leaving
One primary cause of not retaining customers is the disengaged relationship with existing customers or lack of incentives to stay connected. So how do you effectively re-establish relationships with your lapsed customers?
First, marketers need a way to understand why customers left or didn’t interact with your products for a long time. Once you get a deeper understanding of those disengaged customers, it’s time to get marketing efforts aligned towards effective and personalized Winback strategies.
Re-engaging customers with winback journeys
Fortunately, marketers can figure out the reasons behind lapses/dis-engagement and re-establish meaningful relationships with enhanced customer experience using the Cheetah Customer Engagement Suite. Cheetah Journey Designer, our orchestration solution built on our data platform, makes sense of customer data in the context of the moment. Cheetah Journey Designer, along with these advanced insights, further helps marketers target and personalize winback journeys to re-engage with those lapsed customers.
Standard Predictive Winback Journey
Let’s take a detailed look at the top five ways to reconnect and win your customers back:
1. Identify and understand disengaged customers.
Recognize customers and their changing preferences across all channels and touchpoints is the first step before charting your winback strategy. Some key insights you get using Winback Journey in the Cheetah Journey Designer are:
- Why a consumer has not engaged with your brand in a set duration
- Use Machine Learning with a Predictive Winback Journey to identify consumers who have a high propensity to unengage from your product or brand
- Define what “disengaged” means using business rules, such as “no purchase within a year,” or “no open / click activity in six months”
- Mark those who do not wish to stay connected as “lapsed”
2. Trigger reminders to re-engage.
Plan a personalized reminder message to customers to reconnect with your brand as a value exchange and reward them for returning to you. Incentives could range from a chance to have their moments of fame with featured content or exciting new offers, prizes and content by delivering at the right time throughout their journeys. For more, you can leverage Cheetah Experiences to re-engage and keep them coming back to you.
3. Follow up to know preferences.
The Winback Journey enables sending a first email message and attempts to entice the consumer to reconnect with your brand. The journey will then wait to see whether the consumer desires to remain connected. A non-response from a consumer then follows up with a second message to understand their preferences for push notifications. You could also explore their purchase history to determine if they are a “high value” customer. If so, you could send them a special offer, and if not, send them a standard follow-up message.
4. Stay connected with opt-ins.
It’s never good to see customers saying good-bye without any response. In such cases, the Winback journey recognizes the final wait period and the consumer journey ends at that moment. If at any point during this journey, the consumer confirms to remain opt-ed in, the platform records the goal as achieved, and removes the consumer from the journey.
5. Integrate loyalty initiatives.
Lastly, a highly effective way to retain your lapsed customers is to explore enrolling them into loyalty programs or targeted reward programs. Cheetah Intelligent Offers — a natively built capability within Cheetah Personalization — is one such tool that leverages an ML-driven engine to personalize and optimize content for individualized “in-moment” experiences throughout the customer journeys.
At Cheetah Digital, brands and marketers can make use of an integrated Customer Engagement Suite and a series of Journey Companion Guides to help marketers explore different journeys available within the Cheetah Customer Engagement Suite. The Winback Journey Companion Guide entices a disengaged consumer or member to resume their relationship with your product or brand. For more on Cheetah Journey Designer, check out the CES Help Center, and be sure to peruse the full suite of journey companion guides.
