Customer Reactivation Marketing With CRM Software (Steps To Add Fresh Life To Your Old Customers)

We are all aware of the fact that it is always less costly and time-consuming to sell your offerings to existing customers over new ones.
However, this is one area that several marketers fail to comprehend and recognize for their business growth.
Call it “win-back”, “re-engagement”, or “re-activation” the idea is the same, which is to turn inactive names inside your CRM software solution’s database into active prospective customers and then satisfy them for more sales.

Therefore, here are a few steps to add fresh life to your old prospects:

Step #1

One of the most pertinent questions while conducting reactivation marketing is to find out the reason which made the customer go away in the first place.
Using easy to use CRM can help answer this question by looking at your complete contacts and activities with the customer.
Use the information you have on your customer those are active and those inactive in your CRM database.

• Find out how long has it been that you have last contacted the customer?
• Were there any real activities with your inactive customers or they are just names on a list?
• Did your inactive customers had any complaints or were there any delays in delivering your offerings at the time they left?

Now, customers who have left because they were dissatisfied with your products or services pose a unique challenge that requires special nurturing.
Hence, for this you probably have to craft a special email campaign, acknowledging the concerns of your inactive customers describe to them your new business process, and especially stress your efforts to do better in a personalized way.

Step #2

Create a cutoff point. This implies non-responsive customers who have not got engaged with your organization or have not placed an order within a certain period are to be considered inactive and so must be included in your customer reactivation email campaigns.
Now, what this cutoff point should be is a lot of industry-dependent and so are subjected to discretions.
The main point over here is that you need to gauge a time that is long enough to justify that the customer has left, yet it must not be so long that time worsens the customer’s reason for not responding to your calls.
Even though 6 months or a year at the most is a typical period experienced by most in the industry, but still then you need to understand that while a coffee shop can expect to hear from its customers once or twice every month, a florist, on the other hand, may see the customers typically once or twice in a year and consider it to be a justifiable period of time.

Step #3

In the next step go through the names of the inactive customer sales CRM who can generate potential responses and separate them from unlikely responders for a separate campaign.
To do these find all the former active customers who purchased or did respond to your emails and those that never bought or never reacted to your emails previously.
Now, these non-responders are deadwood that you need to trim out. As by doing this activity you have found out your list of ‘lost’ customers those that can be reactivated and so you can hereafter get down to the real work of doing analysis and creating strategies for reactivating them.

Step #4

One primary question you need to ask yourself at this stage is “do you really want this customer back?” Hence, if you find that the customer provided your brand with inconsistent profitability and made marginal transactions, the customer may not be considered worth the efforts to woo them back.
At most, you can make a couple of simple attempts to reestablish contact with such customers.
However, if you find a customer who has remained a long time with your brand, or one that was particularly profitable for your organization, it is worth a more focused effort to win them back.

Step #5

Plan your reactivation-related email campaigns carefully. Remember reactivation campaigns always needs special efforts and thoughts to be most effective.
A typical reactivation campaign will require a nurturing marketing campaign which you can do with your CRM software with typically four to seven attempts to regain your customers.
Usually, you need to proceed with a sales cadence strategy that will make your inactive customers receive better offers successively and then send a final message that simply asks them to re-establish their contact with your brand.
You can remind your customers of the relationship that they had with your business and rekindle their excitement by letting them know of the offerings that your brand introduced since they departed.

Step #6

Customize your messages, particularly the primary ones. This is because, you are trying to reestablish a relationship with someone you already know, and so your first message is critical for building that relationship anew.
Use your customer’s names in the email and remind them of their previous interactions with your brand.

Step #7

Provide incentives and offers to your inactive customers. In order to get them over the hump, offer something special to make your inactive customers make contact or deal with your brand once more.
These incentives can be also non-monitory like an invitation to a beta program, or a product test drive for your new offerings.

Step #8

Include CTA (Call to Action) in your every message which can act as the bait in your effort to make the customer come back.
Test out different CTA messages and thereafter measure their results.

Step #9

Keep a track of the inactive customers who responded and joined back your customer list, or who responded but has not moved towards any further actions, and who did not respond at all, by analyzing the result of your campaigns.
This is where your business CRM software comes into play.
This is because all in one CRM is considered to be the software that can help you to delegate the target population into more specific nurturing campaigns based on their actions.
For example, the inactive customers who responded fully, (will be buying again) can be treated as regular customers, while those who responded to your campaign but did not take further actions should be put into persistent campaigns, and those who did not respond at all may receive a final message from your company or be removed completely from your customer list.

Step #10

Winning back inactive customers is not a one-time event. Therefore, you should always make this an on-going process for getting your customers back, whereby you can use the experience of your previous customer reactivation campaigns to better personalize your messages to move people to be your customers again.

Conclusion

Understanding customer reactivation marketing is more like recycling. You need to accept the fact that a significant percentage of your inactive customers will never return. This is unfortunate but nevertheless true.
Therefore write them off and move on.
Rather think in this way that every customer that you can salvage represents a win for your brand and a positive step towards your business growth.
According to research as it has been found that the price for acquiring a new customer is far higher than reactivating your inactive customers, it is a sound reason as to why customer reactivation marketing is worth your time and money for stellar revenue growth.