Let’s say you have a customer who purchases specific items every 6 weeks on average from you or at least finds their way to your website or store in that time. It’s been 8 weeks with no purchase. Do you know that they’ve lapsed? How do you bring them back?
The first thing you need to do is define what a lapsed customer is for your company. That can vary greatly depending on your company. In auto service that can vary from customer to customer based on how many miles they put on their car. In the pet food business, it’s about every six weeks because that’s how long it takes most people to run out of pet food. For clothing, it might be several months, or a year. Really defining who is lapsed and should considered a reactivation candidate is ideally evaluated on a per customer basis.
The next question is, “What will get them to come back?”
- Rich offers – The most successful campaigns we’ve seen present a really rich offer. Why rich offers? Because they might have started shopping somewhere else and you need to turn their head to get them back to your store.
- Relevant offers – Utilize customer-specific purchase data to present offers for items or services, or any associated items, previously purchased from you. Variable data print enables you to present an appropriate product, image, or offer, personalized to each individual.
One of the highest performing campaigns we have ever seen was a lapsed customer campaign. The client utilized a simple postcard with 42 different variable product offer options. The data pointed to the customer’s last purchase. That was used to drive the coupon that was presented on the direct mail piece. The response rate was 32%. On a slightly humorous note, the campaign exceeded expectations and the client had to creative on funding the promotion. That’s a high class problem.
