Ever tried winning-back inactive customers?
I don’t know about you, but I find it easy to let the urgent crowd out the important. When it comes to satisfying ecommerce orders and making sure that customers get great service, that’s probably a good thing.
By Chris Barling of SellerDeck
The problem with this as a business philosophy is that real opportunities can get forgotten.
Old customers, new orders
One of the things that can often be missed is not bothering to try to get inactive customers to order again. This can be a big mistake, as you have their details and you already know that they will buy online. As well as that, you know that they are interested in the products that you sell! If their previous experience of you was positive, they are, frankly, the best possible prospects on the planet.
The problem is that, with the ability of Google to find a relevant site at any time, your customers may not have remembered you when they came to buy again.
The lucky trigger
If other buyers are like me, and I believe many are, there are things I want to buy, but haven’t got around to ordering yet. So the challenge is how to be the chosen supplier when the time is right.
One of the ways to catch the opportunity is to send an email to re-activate the customer. Here great care is required. This is something the ecommerce packages from my company do out of the box.
I once placed an order with a well-known electrical hardware brand. I would naturally order from a site like this once or so a year. The week after I placed my order, I received an offer by email. It gave me a decent discount so it incentivised me to buy, and I did.
The problem was that the following week I received a further offer, then another the next week. Eventually I unsubscribed, and the last place I will ever buy again is that site. It isn’t worth the hassle when there are plenty of alternatives.
The skill is to try to be at the front of the customer’s mind when they come to place an order, but without infuriating them in the meantime.
Analyse and analyse again
It wouldn’t surprise me if my negative experience came from some experimenting and measurement. You can just hear the board presentation: “We tried sending discount vouchers the week after an order and we got 30% to reorder when normally only 2% do.”
“Great,” the board said, “Now bury them in spam”. The problem is one of intelligence.
Marketing for the bright
A phrase that I used in my book, The Insider’s Guide to Ecommerce, to describe online marketing is that “the nerds are in charge”. Marketing has always fascinated me and never more so than today. Modern digital marketing requires both creative ideas and ruthless testing and metrics.
It’s not one or the other, both must be used. The key point to remember is that in the process of testing, the relationship with the customer must not be broken.
For more information visit www.sellerdeck.co.uk
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