Remarketing is a great tool when a user visits a site, explores a product or service, but doesn’t pull the trigger. After that visit, through the magic of Google or other services, ads for that company appear in the almost-customer’s online browsing. While this is a useful tactic, it can be complicated and costly, which leads us to explore other strategies to target leads, especially those that a company can do in-house. Also, remarketing is focused on customers that didn’t purchase, what about those that did? It’s a well known marketing stat that acquiring a new customer can cost up to six times more than retaining a current customer. So let’s explore some creative ways to target past customers.

Identify the Prospect

It’s an important first step to identify the customer, are you working with customer retention (more on that later) or re-activation? These are two different lifecycles and thus should be treated differently. Retention is focused on recent customers, while reactivation targets a customer that has been dormant. Depending on your product, service, or industry, decide on a time frame of customers you would like to reactivate, IE- customers who’ve purchased in the past year, then go from there.

Reach Out

Let’s start with a simple task, after you’ve identified customers that are ripe for reactivation, reach out to them. Make sure your communication is unique and authentic. Use your data to your advantage! Can you target emails to specific demographics? For example- craft emails to your past female customers with a customized promotional offer. Consider omni channel communications. Email is effective, but on the flipside of the coin, inboxes can be noisey. If you are connected to past customers via social media you can reach out through that channel. Even consider having a customer service rep DM customers. Another option would be to run targeted social ads. The goal here is to creatively start the conversation and not annoy the customer, which can often be a fine line.

Seek Out Feedback

 Depending on the time frame, you can send survey requests to past customers. Timing is important here because sending a survey request to a customer from 6 months ago would be irrelevant and confusing. You can incentivize survey completion with a low-value reward, for example- 5% off your next purchase. Again, here it might pay off to personalize the process, people are more likely to open an email from someone at your company who is conversationally asking for feedback on their experience, than blanket survey emails. Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. Mass survey emails can be used for customer retention and feedback, but personalized emails would be better when you’re tackling reactivation. It doesn’t have to be a complex and tedious process, the personal emails could be done at scale, just create a few templates that relate to different customer types.

These emails are also a good opportunity to ask the customer to consider reviewing your company through a 3rd party site (Yelp, Google, Angie’s List, etc). This will allow you to weed out unhappy inactive customers, perhaps something went wrong that you can address. Or if there is any issue you can use the example to improve your company offerings. Any and all feedback you receive can be used as market research.

‘Come Back, We Missed You’ Offers

Appealing to past customers emotions with ‘come back, we miss you’ offers have become popular, however they are still effective. It not only reminds customers of your presence, it can often be done with a bit of humor and levity, which humanizes your brand. The key here is an engaging subject line that will get the user to open the email (you may even want to hint at the reward or discount). The email will not only convey you miss the customer but offer an incentivized deal for them to come back. Include a link to your website, or a specific coupon code, whichever direction you go with, the email should clearly outline the promotion/deal. Take a look at the email offer a local yoga studio sends past customers who haven’t been in a while. Pretty clever and hits all the marks.

Lifecycle-Based Promotional Offers

Employ some lifecycle research on your customer database. Can you create lists of customers that have purchased around specific holidays or events? A customer who purchased flowers around Valentine’s Day, for instance, would be more likely to purchase at another similar holiday (think mother’s day- another flower-heavy event), or again the following year. If you collect date of birth for customers you can send out birthday promo offers. Promotional offers the focus on specific events or holidays have a better chance at reactivating an old customer than random emails. 

Retention Programs

 If you’ve succeeded in reactivating a customer, you want to make sure you keep them, as well as new and current customers. A retention program can strengthen the relationship customers have with your business. Brainstorm ways you can retain and engage your customer base. Depending on your product or service can you offer a loyalty program—something that rewards your consistent customer base, and offers them unique opportunities? Or perhaps incentivize multiple purchases- bulk discounts work for a reason! The idea is to create an affinity group of customers that will not only keep purchasing, but also be loyal to your brand, sings it’s praises, and perhaps even transform into a brand advocate. The first step to accomplish this is establish a specific program that is focused on retention of recent customers.

The Takeaway

Past customers are low-hanging fruit when it comes to sales, while you might not have them on the hook if you’re working with re-activation, they are at least aware of your brand and have purchased in the past. Brainstorm ways that you can creatively reach out to past customers to at least start the conversation. Personalize your communications! In a digital sea of white noise, a personal touch can go a long way.