It’s unfortunate, but true. Churn happens; it’s just the nature of business. Some of your customers will be “one-and-dones,” while others will stick around for years before leaving your company. Nevertheless, there will come a time where even your most valuable customers no longer support your brand like they used to.
But just as you can get at-risk customers back on track, you can very often reactivate those who’ve stopped engaging with your company. We’ll dig into the best ways to reengage both quick and late-churn customers.
More from PostFunnel on retention:
How Can Companies Deal with Disloyalty?
5 Tips from Companies that Put Customer Centricity Up Front
Keep Your Customers! Use These 3 Engaging Loyalty Boosters
Defining Quick-Churn and Late-Churn Customers
Quick-churn customers are the relatively “uninitiated” patrons who churn before they acclimate to your brand. Late-churn customers are those who were actively engaged, but decided to stop doing business with your company.
What does “truly acclimated” or “actively engaged” mean, though? Well, it depends on:
- The complexity of your offer
- The amount of time before the offer brings value
- Your average customer lifespan and lifetime value
For example, the Optimove team defines quick-churn customers as those who made a single iGaming purchase and were then inactive for at least two weeks. Optimove’s late-churn customers are those who have actively used their iGaming service for more than two weeks, but have since stopped engaging with it altogether.
Let’s discuss how to win back your short-term customers who churned without receiving value from your product or services.
(In Part Two of this series, we’ll focus on winning back late-churn customers.)
3 Keys to Winning Back Quick-Churn Customers
Perhaps one of the most disheartening aspects in business is witnessing a new customer churn almost immediately after transitioning to a paying customer. When this happens, it means all the time, money, and energy the company invested into converting that customer was for naught. Unfortunately, this is usually accompanied by an immediate loss of resources and revenue as well.
But rather than starting from scratch with a new prospect, you can reach out to these quick-churn customers and try persuading them to reconsider their decision.
Reinforce the Value of Your Offer
Quick-churn customers have barely scratched the surface of your offering. Most likely, they churned due to a relatively minor negative experience that’s easily fixable. When reengaging with these customers, reinforce your value proposition.
They were once interested enough in your business to make a purchase, so reminding them of how you’ll solve their issue could spark renewed enthusiasm. Revisit their pain points, reoffer your services, and showcase social proof of your value. Then, you need to check that they have access to in-depth onboarding instructions and content that’ll help them dive into your offerings. For example, Grammarly includes a quick writing tip with its reengagement emails:
Your customers must understand that any ‘wins’ will compound over time. Stitch Fix, for example, provides its long-time customers with hyper-personalized and more accurate recommendations than the ones new patrons receive.
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Many of your quick-churn customers will leave because they realized your brand wasn’t a good fit for them, but others may not have witnessed the product’s true potential. By reinforcing this notion, you can begin getting your potentially high-value quick-churn customers back on track.
Incentivize Their Return
If we’re being honest, value proposition reminders may not work when reengaging all of your quick-churners. In some cases, you may have to rely on tangible rewards and incentives to entice short-time customers to give your brand another chance.
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You know the drill: make promotions personal and relevant and provide an incentive that the customer will appreciate and use to further engage with your brand. Just remember, you don’t want to overextend yourself — as these individuals might not pay you back. For instance, you wouldn’t give a quick-churner a 50% discount when they’ll likely take advantage of the offer and never return.
The incentives you offer quick-churn customers should depend on a single metric:
Lifetime value.
Consider the average lifetime value of your entire customer base as well as the average lifetime value of customers within a specific segment. This way, you’ll get a ballpark of the customer’s projected value and can tailor your offer accordingly. It’s worth your time to focus on reengaging potential high-value customers and leave behind those who may not be a good fit for your company.
Once you determine a high LTV of a quick-churned customer, you can then give them a small discount upfront — knowing that you’ll soon recoup the added cost.
Solicit Feedback
If you discover that your quick-churn customers have no intention of doing business with you again, you’ll want to ask them one question:
Why not?
Get to the heart of the matter. Something went wrong that dissuaded them from engaging further with your brand. It’s important to find out what that ‘something’ is immediately — otherwise you run the risk of losing other potential high-value customers due to an issue your team could easily solve.
For example, in the screenshot below, UK-based clothing company Office asks new customers whether the offers they’re receiving are relevant.
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Customer feedback is also important for knowing how you can improve moving forward. Finally, ask the customer how they want to proceed. Do they want to:
- Continue receiving correspondences as usual, despite their status as lapsed customers
- Only receive specific communications, such as certain product upgrades or releases
- Stop receiving communications altogether
They’ll either keep your brand in the back of their mind, or move on right then and there. While you’d obviously hope for a rosier outcome, if they choose the latter, you can begin investing your reengagement efforts elsewhere.
Coming Up Next
In the next post in our series, we’ll shift our focus to engaging with your once-loyal customers who have walked away from your brand.
Be sure to check it out right here next week on PostFunnel.
