As customer acquisition costs keep on increasing, brands are forced to look at other impactful ways to grow revenue year on year. Now we must say having a solid win-back strategy is an absolute must-have as it’s far more cost efficient to reactivate an old client than acquiring a new one. As a matter of fact it costs up to 5x more to acquire a new client vs. reactivating an existing one. 

Now what does win-back strategy mean: it all comes down to reactivating inactive clients. Cause a client who was once interested in your brand, could still be, right?  

How to set-up a solid win-back strategy: 

1.      Start segmenting

• How you should define ‘inactive’ depends on the nature of your business, there’s no golden rule here. For some businesses it makes sense to consider people who have not been engaging with their mails as ‘inactive’, for some ‘inactive’ can be defined as past customers who have not purchased for a while. 
• Carefully look at the timeframe you’ll use when segmenting f.e. It makes sense for a mattress company to put the timeframe longer vs. while the customer journey and lifetime value of a beauty brand can be way shorter. 
• When you have no clue on where to start: start playing with those boundaries and definitions. Quickly you’ll see which segments make sense and which are worth producing separate content and incentives for. 

2.      Content is key

• The subject line should be your rockstar, as this determines whether your email is opened or sent to trash straight away. We have learned that making it personal and including sentences like: “We miss you,” “Come back,” or “It’s been a while” work great and improve open rates. 
• Now we’ve got them to open the mail, it’s time to look at the content of the mail. Take a closer look at each segment as different content might trigger them to come back. Think of latest best sellers, more info on how to use a specific product, or personalise it with products that they have shown interest in in the past. 
• Next to dazzling content you can also determine whether you want to give an incentive. Of course you would want to pay more for customers who have been inactive for a while but had a high customer lifetime value in the past. Including an incentive indeed shows better re-activation rates. However choose wisely and monitor your results closely as clients may come used to this after a while.  

3.      Experiment, iterate and learn along the way.

Once you’ve defined your set-up it’s time to play, iterate and learn what works best for your brand. Important metrics to consider: 

• Open rate 
• Click rate 
• Re-activation rate 
• Actual revenue you get out of it

Now you’re all set! Still have questions on how to set-up our optimize your win-back strategy? Our Dotters are here to help!