5 Simple Steps to Get Lost Customers Back and Spending Again

You don’t need to be a superhero to find lost customers.

5 SIMPLE STEPS TO GET LOST CUSTOMERS BACK AND SPENDING AGAIN

If you’ve ever wondered why some of your customers are “missing in action,” this could be the most important thing you’ve ever read.

1 – Do your customers know you’re missing them?

 Reviewing your database to see if you have any customers who are “missing in action” is an interesting exercise to conduct.  If you don’t know what the change is in your database then it’s impossible to know the extent to which your customer loyalty is working.  Have you considered or do you know…

2 – Who’s on your casualty list?

 I encourage my clients to do a simple comparative analysis of something they do regularly for clients. For example, accountants may choose individual tax returns, principles may choose number of listings, and a broker might choose signups.

Firstly, pick a period. For example, you may choose to look at the three months from January to March 2017 and compare them to January to March 2018.  How many of your customers who came in for this service in the 2017 period have come back again and are still using your services in the 2018 period?  Once you have that number, you then need to determine from your database exactly who hasn’t come back. Once you have the data that tells you which of your customers haven’t been back then it’s time to let them know that you’re missing them…

3 – Time to conduct a rescue mission…

Send your old customers a letter, an email or a text message. Start a campaign and let them know that you’ve missed them and that you’d love to see them come back.  

4 – And don’t forget to include a care package!

Also offer your missing customers something…maybe a free product or a value add or a package purchase as an incentive to get them to start doing business with you again.  This step is about letting your customers know that you value their custom and that you’re sorry to see them go. This is a vital part of nurturing your customer base and restarting that relationship.

This works very well with automated digital marketing to current customers too. Every so often, offer a returning customer (or a new customer for that matter) a special purchase even if you are selling that purchase at little or no profit or even at a small loss.  Remember that we are focusing on the lifetime value of that customer.  So even if you are making no profit or a small loss on the front end, if it brings the customer back and affords you the opportunity to sell them something else, then you have positively contributed to the lifetime value of that customer.  This is commonly known as breaking even on the front end. 

5 – And finally…Check your customer casualty statistics

I  had this discussion with a client from the pool shop industry. I showed them how if they had not had the drop off rate that they did from one year to the next then based on an average dollar sale across 12 months they could have added in excess of $70,000 to their bottom line.

Now keep in mind, if your letter (or email, or SMS) letting these people know that you missed them had an 80% strike rate (in other words, just 20 per cent of those people that you wrote to came back to give you their custom) then you would still be adding (based on the example figures given) nearly $15,000 to the bottom line.  Keeping in contact with old customers regularly is a really simple way of improving your cash flow in your business and yet most businesses don’t do it. Leading into the quieter times is a perfect opportunity for you to start working on getting people to come back.  Remember you’ve got to let them know two things.  Firstly, that you’ve noticed that they haven’t come back and secondly that you’d really love to see them again.

Here is a simple example of how this concept works.  Imagine we have the following:

If I use the skills we have discussed to increase by 10%

Let’s look at another:

Increase by 10%:

These numbers may not resinate with your numbers, but the concept and process are still the same. Having an assessment on the life time value of your clients and knowing the improvements you can make to your business is in your hands. So, in conclusion, run these five steps every year to make sure you’re nurturing that all important return relationship with your customers and keeping them from getting “lost”.