4 Foolproof Tactics to Reengage Lapsed Customers
Has your business’s growth come to a standstill? It happens to every business: sales are strong and every month’s results are better than the last, until all of a sudden the usually excellent growth rate drops to almost nothing.
Businesses slow down for a variety of reasons, from changes in market conditions to seasonal demand that varies from month to month. If your business has experienced a slowdown in growth, a great way to reverse this is to reengage lapsed customers.
There are several ways to get in touch with lapsed customers and past clients, from phone calls to email marketing. One of the most effective ways to relight a business relationship is to send targeted, customized direct mail to your lapsed customers.
Discover four simple but effective ways to reengage lapsed customers and fuel your business’s growth using custom postcards.
Categorize customers before you mail
Before you send a custom postcard to reengage past customers, it’s important to ask yourself how much it’s really worth to reengage them. Not all customers have the same value to your business, and some might not be worth reengaging.
Apply the Pareto Principle to your customer reengagement campaign and create categories for different types of customers. Group customers by their monthly or yearly spend to get an idea of how much each individual customer is worth.
This way, you can focus your marketing efforts on high-value customers. With a separate group for each customer, you can send simple postcards to occasional customers and highly customized direct mail postcards to higher-value ones.
Offer a discount or great deal
Did your business lose a customer to a competitor? If you lost a customer because of a better deal elsewhere, a great way to win them back is by offering an excellent deal or an additional form of value.
If price is an important factor for customers in your market, try offering a discount or special offer in your direct mail postcard. If value is more important, market an additional value add as a way to win back customers.
Customers that left your business because of a better deal elsewhere can easily be won back with an even better deal. Think of a way to offer better value than your competitors and you could win back clients that have lapsed.
Ask how you can be of service
One of the simplest yet most effective ways to win back customers is to simply reach out and ask them how you can help them. This is particularly effective if you operate a service business or provide a product that helps your customers do something.
Some customers will stop doing business with you not because they’ve switched to a competitor, but because they lost the need for your product or service. In time, their need for your product or service could come back, making them a valuable prospect.
If a previously steady customer’s account has lapsed for several months, reach out to ask them how you can be of service. Getting in touch is all it takes to switch a business relationship from “off” right back to “on.”
Reconnect to ask for feedback
Not all lapsed customers can be won back. If your business has lost a customer and can’t seem to win them back – for example, they fail to respond to a reengagement postcard – it’s worth asking them for feedback about why they left.
Customers can leave your business for a variety of reasons. They could have found a better deal elsewhere that you don’t know about, or an issue with your product or service could have made them change their minds.
Reach out to lapsed and uninterested customers to ask for their feedback on your product or service, and especially on why they left. You could discover something that’s preventing your business from retaining customers and clients.
Use these four tactics to reach out to lapsed customers and reengage with them and it’s likely that many of your lapsed customers will return and continue to support your business.
