The Silent Treatment
Dormant customers, also known as inactive customers, are a present phenomenon in nearly every industry. A percentage of most business’ mailing lists in all likelihood contain dormant customers, who were once active but have since gone quiet. Reactivating those customers is a form of customer retention, which is an important driver of profit: Bearing in mind that a customer’s value increases with time and that a 1% increase in retention increases profitability by 25-95%, reactivating dormant customers is a significant task. However, reactivating dormant customers is a struggle for many companies.
Companies often encounter the issue that they don’t have the capabilities necessary to engage beyond generic email campaigns, which are unlikely to re-engage customer attention. Sending engaging, personalized, and relevant messages across a dormant customer’s preferred channels is a more effective approach. That, however, requires detailed customer data that is shared across channels to ensure consistent messaging and customer journeys. As a simple customer journey example, a customer who has become dormant could be sent a reactivation email, and if there is no response, a reactivation letter in the mail after a month. Even simple journeys such as this, when performed at scale, require marketing technology capable of orchestrating engagement channels.
What’s needed is marketing tech that enables both detailed customer understanding and consistent cross-channel engagement.
Re-Connecting
A customer data platform (CDP) creates detailed, real-time 360-degree profiles for every user. Marketers can segment their user base according to any of their customers’ known traits.
CDPs allow the data to be acted upon instantly, and act as core connectors for various messaging channel solutions: That means that communication can take the form of consistent campaigns across a customer’s preferred channels, such as, for example email, text message, or push notification.
Marketers performing reactivation campaigns can use a CDP to identify dormant customers and tailor personalized campaigns to them.
Dormant customers can then be segmented by their behavioral, transactional and/or user traits, allowing for highly personalized reactivation campaigns. The campaigns can take into account what customers have bought in the past, what the customers’ demographics are, what channels they prefer to be contacted through and more.
It’s personalized reactivation at scale, and goes far beyond generic email campaigns.
Increased Subscriptions
A subscription-based food company is using CrossEngage to run dormant customer reactivation campaigns, and saw an increase in subscription reactivations of 26.76% over eleven months.
Read more about CDP technology in our Beginner’s Guide.