Best Customer Winback Strategy for Success this 2023

It is essential to have a customer winback strategy in the current market. Customers switch between options when they notice a brand is not maximizing their happiness in today's age of demanding customers and fiercely competing for brands. It is now essential for businesses to reclaim lost consumers, as recruiting new ones can cost five times as much. 

There are various reasons for high customer churn, and managers must carefully consider each one. Customers typically lose interest in a brand when they believe it is uninterested in them. It is the responsibility of brand representatives to remind clients of the company’s value to them regularly.

Why do customers leave?

There is a massive area of opportunities that lost customers represent. They understand your products and services. Knowing why a customer left makes it easier to remedy and help in winning back lost customers. So this should be your starting point. Among the top reasons are:

You or Your Company Let Trust Erode

Above all, you should protect your integrity as a service and product provider. Being transparent and open if there are any mishaps instead of covering up does wonder for building trust. A substantial negative factor is sporadic engagement efforts. A customer may feel like she is undervalued compared to another customer.

Cannot Make Decisions Anymore

Maybe the contact was moved to another job detail or transferred to another company. Ask for a referral so you may continue doing business with the company. The salespeople who lost the accounts didn't ask for their business again.

Five Steps to a Customer Winback Strategy Program

After identifying why the customer left, it is now easier to know which move to make. 

Concentrate just on the "best" consumers who have gone missing

Your customer retention strategy shouldn't focus on bringing back every lapsed customer to your website or app.

Some clients are better to target than others, just as they are with ordinary marketing efforts. If a customer doesn't meet your ideal criteria, has a poor lifetime value, or contributes only a small amount to your MRR, they're probably best served elsewhere.

There's no point wasting money on consumers who will not come back a second time. Data on previous consumer behavior will provide the most accurate indications of who is more likely to return.

Your most valued past customers are those who:

1. Have recommended your company to others
2. Rather than the quality of service, their reason for leaving was cost
3. Have you ever had a complaint that gets satisfactorily resolved

Your consumers left for various reasons, not all of which were the same

While a win back program's goal is to re-engage past consumers, not all of them took a break from your company for the same reasons.

Disparities in motivation to depart lead to differences in incentive to return; thus, handing out a 10% discount deal to all lapsed clients and hoping they bite is wishful thinking. So what can be the reason?

Consumers may cancel their subscription to your service or stop making purchases because of product constraints, price hurdles, lousy customer service, a lack of product comprehension, or other reasons.

To figure out how to personalize your winbacks to address each reason we mentioned above, you can by answering the following three questions. Try to see if your answer matches the one listed as well:

If you still get stumped for ideas, statistics reveal that customer win back emails that gave a dollar discount are better than those that offered a percentage discount.

Don't hesitate to take your customer-back approach incentives based on a percentage or a monetary amount! Offer coupons for specific products, a free consultation with a product specialist, or some corporate swag like custom jackets, sweatshirts, or hoodies.

Keep in mind that the reward you provide will impact a customer's behavior when they return. Discounts on a single purchase may not entice someone to reactivate their membership, but a discount on their subsequent five transactions may help someone re-establish a strong repeat usage habit.

Your regaining control program is self-contained.

When you use dedicated software, your win back program's prizes can be handed out automatically to the correct clients at the proper times, eliminating manual monitoring.

As a result:

• Choose the sort of winback reward you'd like to send and the amount you'd like to send.
• Customize the award notice email delivered to clients who have earned a reward successfully.
• Begin to reclaim customers!

Making the reward available to the customer enhances the chances of taking it, and you can include an expiration date to add a sense of urgency.

Always keep track of your progress.

Tracking your customer-back approach program's results ensures that you're making the most of your resources (both human and financial).

Measuring how much of an influence a customer has on your revenue once they've gotten re-engaged and what kind of lifetime value they now represent is an essential factor. Customers who are reactivated and engaged for an extended period, rather than receiving the incentive and then going quiet again, are the hallmarks of an excellent winback campaign.

To evaluate how well your customer-back approach is bringing people back on board, try assessing the performance of your program using a reactivation rate (percent). This is comparable to how a percentage gets used to tracking lead conversion.

Your program's data allows you to evaluate and adjust your incentive approach over time by experimenting with reward value, email language, and scheduling to find a formula that produces the best conversion rates.

Your winback strategy should work hand-in-hand with your lifecycle marketing plan.

Win back campaigns can be an effective way to reclaim lost clients, but user engagement should not begin after the customer has already left!

Win back campaigns, we believe, are a crucial part of lifecycle marketing.

Reactivation efforts, such as a winback offer, can supplement your lifecycle marketing when clients need a little additional nudge because it's unreasonable to expect every customer to stick around forever.

On the other hand, a compartmentalized customer-back approach runs the danger of customers taking advantage of your reactivation offerings only to cancel or lapse after they've used it up, resulting in a negative ROI.

Strategies to Improve Your Customer Winback Strategy

Have Client Behavior Data on Hand

Companies must have access to information about their consumers' preferences and experiences. Preference management should be accomplished quickly by maintaining a user's preferred choices database, which can be generated by inquiring about the user's interests via checkboxes or questions on the signup form. This information allows the organization to present its clients with better and more appealing products and services.

Examine the Reasons Behind Their Inactivity

Customers nowadays have high expectations of brands. If a brand fails to meet these expectations, customers will quickly abandon it. As a result, it's critical to understand why your consumers have been inactive for so long, as this information can assist you in providing them with a better experience. 

If a corporation immediately fixes a customer's problem, it has a reasonable probability of keeping them. As a result, customer care representatives should know why clients switched from one platform to another.

As a result, asking lapsed customers for feedback on their most recent purchase is a terrific method to re-engage them. This feedback is a fantastic way to determine where the company went wrong. In addition, the feedback email campaign reminds customers of the brand's value proposition and encourages them to return to their website. Amazon uses this method and asks for feedback on recent purchases, and as a result, it has a large number of devoted customers.

Put a Premium on One-on-one Interactions With Clients

Customers' hearts get won through personalization. Well-crafted win back email examples can quickly re-engage customers. Customers should get approached emotionally using relevant taglines to enhance click-through rates. They react when they see headlines like "We miss you" or "We hear you've been busy."

According to a Return Path study, just 12% of consumers who receive customer win back emails read them, indicating that the win back email examples can encourage a considerable proportion of customers to return to the website.

Make Re-engagement Appealing

It's crucial for enticing a passive user to return. Discounts and promotions are practical tools for capturing these clients' attention. However, the offer should be only for a limited time, creating a sense of urgency among clients. This method gets used by many businesses to reclaim lapsed clients. It's a fantastic idea to give deals that buyers won't discover anywhere else. For instance, Joy, an online clothing company, offers discounts to inactive users to rekindle interest in inactive clients and encourage them to return to their store. Crocs are also known for sending enticing discount offers in the hopes of regaining previous clients.

Recognize When It's Time to Split Ways

The company should be attentive in identifying inactive accounts with the lowest engagement levels. This simple activity can assist in the elimination of unnecessary costs that do not have the potential to turn into revenues. Breakup emails should also have an emotional or hilarious tone. They should not act as though they don't care about the clients.

Which is the most profitable winback strategy?

Knowing what kind of offers bring in the most clients isn't enough; understanding the expenses and returns of each is also crucial. Although service upgrades have the lowest success rate, they are the most cost-effective and provide the best return on investment. While the bundled offer has the best success rate, it also has an enormous cost and the lowest return on investment. Because many companies are in industries where market share is essential, they don't always adopt the approach that will maximize profit.

Many businesses still have a lot to learn about regaining lost clients. Instead of appealing to every defector, identifying those most likely to return can raise winback campaign rates by eightfold. A major corporation with several product lines, such as a telecommunications provider that provides landline, cable, wireless, and home security services, can benefit from more advanced studying of customer behavior to create tempting bundles.

Tips and Best Practices for WinBack Campaigns

Because winback email campaign is as much an art as it is a science, follow these tried-and-true best practices and tips from those who have already succeeded:

1. The winback email subject lines and the winback email templates should be brief and accurate.
2. Only a straightforward call to action should get used.
3. Send multiple re-engagement winback emails, but space them out based on time or behavior.
4. Experiment with various rewards. Marketing Land said "save X dollars" discounts and "X percent off" deals worked twice.
5. Keep your brand voice consistent, but don't be scared to experiment with email tone. Be approachable and amusing.
6. Personalize your communications using whatever data you already have.
7. Remind them of your worth and your previous connection.

What has changed in your customer win-back approach?

Our analytics on individual clients and their previous interactions with us are becoming more sophisticated. We can now perform mass tailored marketing—customizing the message, the offer, and the pricing—at scale. 

New services, such as one-gigabit internet speeds and home automation and security systems, provide lapsed clients a cause to reconsider their decision. If we strengthen the value offered, people are more inclined to return. Winbacks are becoming increasingly crucial, and we're becoming better at it.

How do you decide what to offer stale customers?

A Perfect Winback Campaign's Anatomy

A win back customer email template is an individualized and targeted message sent to lapsed consumers. If they've been inactive for a while, all they require is a gentle prod to get them going again.

And the humbled ‘we’ve missed you email template’ can help you do just that.

Who's up for a re-election campaign?

The first stage is to identify consumers who are ready to be re-engaged. This isn't a mass-mailing effort. It must be targeted and individualized to be effective. So, who exactly are we on the lookout for? Customers who have become stale and inert. Easy.

What is the definition of a "lapsed" customer? That's not so simple, is it? Your purpose may differ from mine, and we may vary from others.

Your sector and product largely determine the parameters. Is it a monthly SaaS subscription, cosmetic items, annual memberships, clothing, fruit baskets, organic pet food, or electronics that you're offering?

What qualifies as inactive is determined by your product catalog. As a general guideline, it's best to wait 3-6 months between eCommerce purchases. However, if you sell monthly subscriptions or annual memberships, this will not work.

Customers are more likely to buy dog food monthly if you sell a 4-week supply. Memberships to your online training sessions on an annual basis? Every year, you'd like to see them renew.

Why should you care about winback campaigns?

In almost every statistic, a retained customer outperforms an acquired client.

1. The average winback email campaign list loses 20-25 percent of its active contacts every year.
2. Forty-five percent of people will open future emails after receiving a re-engagement email.
3. Repeat customers account for about 40% of your revenue.
4. Customers who have made more transactions have a 60-70 percent chance of buying again, compared to a 1-3 percent conversion rate for new customers.
5. Customers who have purchased from you before are nine times more likely to convert than fresh prospects (Adobe)
6. The top 10% of your clients spend three times more than the bottom 90%, and the top 1% spend five times more.

Final Note

If you want your businesses to benefit from lapsed consumers, AI bees is here to help, because the likelihood of retrieving them is higher than recruiting new customers. 

This data further emphasizes the need for customer retention. Brands that place a premium on customer retention prosper and see their earnings increase.

Due to the fierce rivalry among brands, businesses must develop a practical and sound winback campaign. They also require a customer service team that is empowered and equipped with the necessary resources.

If you need support on how to win back a client, contact us today.